I only know that the object I had grieved as lost had been, all along, safe in the keeping of the one person in our family who had never once let go of her.

And that undid me completely, before he had even spoken, because it told me, in an instant, that everything I had believed about my son’s healing was wrong, and everything I had believed about my daughter’s slow disappearance from our lives was wrong too.

She had never disappeared.

Her brother had been keeping her, all along.

Chapter 7 — Lily

To understand what my son had done, you have to understand the daughter I lost.

Seventeen years ago, Lily lost her battle with childhood leukemia, three weeks before what would have been her sixth birthday.