Even fading, even frightened, she wanted so badly to be seen.

And the red dress, she believed, made her impossible to miss.

It was the last thing that made her feel like herself, a small bright girl in a big dim world, refusing, in her own gentle way, to disappear.

Chapter 8 — The Night Before

On the night before she passed away, in the pediatric hospice wing where we spent her final days, her five-year-old twin brother, Julian, sat beside her bed and held her small, pale hand.

I remember it, though I have spent seventeen years trying not to.