“My family is completely normal,” she said, with a confidence that stopped my breath.

“Because people die, plans change, and the people who stay still have to choose each other every day.”

I had to look at the floor for a moment.

Because that sentence, from a ten-year-old, was wiser than anything the Army had ever taught me, and it was the exact opposite of the lie Pamela had spent two years trying to install in her — the lie that our family was broken, incomplete, a problem waiting for an outsider to arrive and fix.

Hannah had understood the truth that I had nearly missed, the truth that had been sitting in my own house the whole time I was searching for it elsewhere.