Grace was one of those children.

And it was her reaching, in the end, and not any courage of my own, that finally pulled the whole hidden truth up into the light where it could do its work.

Chapter 7 — Why Don’t We Visit Grandpa and Grandma

“Why don’t we ever visit Grandpa and Grandma?” It was the question I dreaded most, and Grace began asking it when she was very small, the way children ask about the shape of the family around them, wanting to know where the missing pieces had gone.

For years I gave her soft, incomplete answers, the kind a mother reaches for when the true answer is a wound she cannot yet reopen, the kind you give a child who is not yet ready for the real thing, and the truth was that I gave them partly because she was not ready and partly because I was not.