And then I look back, because I do not want to miss a second of it, and I clap for her tower, and I mean it with my whole heart, because a child who has just built something and held it up to be seen deserves to be seen, fully, by someone whose face tells her the truth: that she is a wonder, that her work matters, that the person she is delighting is delighted all the way down.

Grief does strange things across time.

In the beginning, in those first weeks, seeing Evelyn’s smile on Maya’s face was almost pure pain, a reminder with every flash of it of the sister we had lost and failed.

But something has shifted over the years, slowly, the way a wound becomes a scar and then becomes simply a part of you.

Now when I see our sister’s smile break open on my daughter’s face, the grief is still there, it will always be there, but it comes woven together with something else, something that feels almost like Evelyn’s presence, as though a piece of her got through, as though the smile is a small window she left open so that she could keep watching her daughter grow.