I had been so certain that I was protecting Julian from the full force of that loss, keeping the worst of it away from him, letting him have a childhood despite it.

And I had been, in a way I did not understand until he knelt beside my seat in that auditorium, completely wrong.

Because Julian had been carrying Lily too, all along, in a way I had never seen, could never have seen, because he had never let me.

While I grieved her as a mother grieves a daughter, he had grieved her as a twin grieves the other half of himself, which is a particular and terrible grief I had not even thought to look for, because he was so young when she died and had seemed, over the years, to recover.

He had not recovered.

He had simply carried it silently, privately, faithfully, the way he carried the promise, and I had walked beside my grieving son for seventeen years and mistaken his silence for healing.

A parent thinks she sees her child completely.

I had missed the largest thing in mine.

And it took a red dress, and a laughing auditorium, and a locket placed in my trembling hands, to show me that the boy I thought I had been protecting from grief had, in truth, been carrying it as faithfully as I had, and more bravely, and entirely alone.

Chapter 2 — Please Don’t Do This

He had told me his plan two weeks earlier.

It was after two in the morning, in our kitchen, because neither of us had been sleeping much that spring.

When he first showed me the dress, laying it across the kitchen table between us, I shook my head before I could stop myself.

“Please don’t do this,” I said.