“She has Paige’s serious face when she’s thinking.”

We were silent a moment.

“Can I ask what you remember about Paige as a girl?” I said.

Natalie opened the album to a photograph of three children standing in a kitchen.

Paige was about nine, wearing a paper crown made from magazine pages.

Brandon, younger then, had frosting on his shirt.

Natalie looked irritated, though she admitted she had probably just been told she couldn’t lick the mixing bowl.

“Paige made every birthday feel like an event,” Natalie said.