That was the lie grief had told me, I saw now, and it was the cruelest lie of all — that love was a finite thing, a quantity, something that lived inside particular people and left the world entirely when those people did.

For seven months I had believed it.

I had done the terrible math of it in my head a hundred times: two people gone, so two people’s worth of love gone with them, subtracted out of my life forever, leaving me that much poorer.

But that is not how it works.

That was never how it works.

My parents did not take their love out of the world when they left it.

They had spent eighteen years pouring it into me and into Ethan and into the walls of that house and into Evelyn, and it was all still here — it had soaked into all of us and become part of what we were made of, and it went on working long after they were gone, the way the warmth of a fire stays in the stones of a hearth for hours after the flame is out.