“You don’t have to hide in the driveway.

We can be sad together.”

That was the whole of it, really — the thing I had missed and my nine-year-old understood at once.

She had been so determined to protect us from her pain that she’d carried it out in a locked car in the dark, alone, every single night.

And all along, the thing that would begin to heal it was the simplest thing in the world: to not be alone with it anymore.

Chapter 26 — Six Months