All of them. That word had been in ruins eight months ago, and here it was again, meaning something.

In March, Claire stood looking at Zoe’s drawings on the wall — the two of them, side by side now.

In the first, a father in gray pencil, colorless, banished to the very edge, barely there.

In the newer one, the same man drawn in full color, closer in, part of the family even from his own separate house.

Consequences remained. Nothing was erased. But that was exactly the point, she thought: healing had never meant pretending the first drawing didn’t exist. It meant being able to make the second one true.

She thought about that a great deal, standing there — about how a seven-year-old had understood, with her crayons, something it had taken Claire the whole year to put into words.