The child who had wept at a curb that she didn’t want to get attached, who had punched a boy for saying Ifeoma would die, had gone quiet and picked up a pencil and drawn the three of them into the same world.

Emeka understood that the fear had not vanished — Winnie was still a girl who had lost her mother, still braced against loving anything she might lose — but that she had made the choice anyway, the brave and terrible choice to let someone in despite the risk.

Adanna would have wept to see it.

The very thing she had feared most, that her death would teach her family to stop reaching for people, had been quietly refused by her daughter on a Beacon Hill terrace, with a stick of graphite and a satellite drawn in the corner of a purple sky.

He pinned it to the refrigerator where he would see it every morning, and every morning it told him the same thing: they were already a family.

The paperwork was just running behind the drawing.