I knew it.

I had known it for seven months.

And standing at that rail in my too-big gown, I understood that I would carry that knowledge for the rest of my life — that whatever else happened to me, I was now and always a person to whom the worst thing had already happened once, and could happen again.

It is a lonely thing to know at seventeen.

It was, I would soon learn, not a thing I was going to have to keep knowing alone.

Chapter 2 — The Woman Who Raised Me

After the accident, there was only Evelyn.

My grandmother.

She was the one who took me in, though it would be truer to say she simply kept me, since I had spent half my childhood in her house anyway, in the good years, before everything.

Evelyn had raised me as much as my parents had.

She had been the one at the kitchen table with the crossword and the second cup of coffee, the one who taught me to ride a bike and to tell the truth and to make her particular soup, the one who had, all my life, managed to be a grandmother and a parent and a best friend at the same time, all folded into one small determined woman who smelled of lavender and strong tea.

But Evelyn was old now, and the year had been hard on her too — she had lost her own child in that accident, my father, a grief I could not even let myself look at directly — and her body had begun, that spring, to fail in the small relentless ways that bodies do.

Her hands shook when she poured the tea, so that the cup rattled against the saucer and she would laugh, embarrassed, and blame the cold.

She got winded walking to the mailbox and back.