“Daddy, look!” she calls, her voice clear and proud and delighted with herself.

“Big tower!”

My chest expands with a warmth so deep it stings behind my eyes.

“I see it, sweetheart!” I call back.

“That is incredible building!” And she claps her hands, and her whole round face breaks open into a radiant, gap-toothed smile, and it is Evelyn’s smile.

It is our sister’s exact smile, the one she wore whenever she accomplished something she had worked hard for, arrived intact across the boundary of death and grief and fourteen abandoned months, shining now out of the face of her daughter on a sunlit deck in Texas.

I have to look away for a moment, every single time, because the sight of it is almost more than a person can hold.