And Caleb collapsed into it.

He held his son tightly, desperately, and buried his face in the shoulder of the red silk dress he had condemned only two weeks before, and he sobbed, the deep, wracking sobs of seventeen years of unshed grief at last released.

And I stood in the doorway of my own kitchen and watched seventeen years of silence, and buried grief, and emotional distance, and a father’s cowardice and a family’s unspoken loss, all of it break apart at once, dissolved in the embrace of a boy in a red dress and the father who had finally come home to his grief.

Lily had wanted, more than anything, not to be forgotten, and not to be overlooked.