And in our kitchen that night, at last, seventeen years after we lost her, her whole family stopped looking away from her at the same time.

I want to say something about Caleb, because it would be easy to cast him simply as the villain of this story, the cold father who abandoned his son and buried his daughter’s memory, and that would be both unfair and untrue.

Caleb did a terrible thing, in refusing to grieve, in demanding we lock Lily away, in leaving Julian to carry her alone.

But he did it out of an excess of love, not a lack of it, and I have lived with him long enough to know the difference.