“Mommy,” she said, around the last of her popsicle, “Uncle Jim said we can go to the zoo tomorrow.

Can we?

Can we really?”

I looked over her head at my brother, who had rebuilt himself from almost nothing and shown up, week after week, with groceries and popsicles and the steady ordinary love that children actually need.

He gave me a small shrug and a grin.

It was a good grin, an unguarded one, the kind I had not seen on him in the gray year before any of this began.

I had spent a long time grieving the brother I thought I’d lost to his own bad choices, and here he was, not the same as before — you do not come back from a thing like that the same — but somehow more himself than he had been in years, as though the fire had burned away something false and left the true thing standing.