We have not spoken since.

She sends a card at Christmas addressed to both of us.

Junie thinks she is a woman I used to work for, which is accurate, and which I will expand on when she is older and asks properly.

Part Eighteen: The Boring Kind

Junie is eleven.

She is on a biologic every eight weeks and she has been hospitalized once in four years, for a day and a half, after an influenza thing that would have put her in for a week when she was seven.

She carries a rescue inhaler in a zip pocket and knows her own action plan better than most of the adults who have been handed it, and twice in the last year she has been the one who told me she was not right, early, before I saw it, which is the entire goal of everything anybody has ever done for her.