“She can have a turn when you’re ready to share,” I said.

“Not before.

It’s yours.” And I watched something reorganize behind his serious eyes — the discovery, at seven years old, that he was allowed to love his sister and also be a person, that caring for her did not require disappearing, that there was finally enough of everything, including him.

This was the deepest of the repairs, and the last, and the one I am proudest of, because it was the one that gave Ollie back to himself.

For three years he had been taught a brutal math: that love was subtraction, that to care for Josie meant to hand her his food, his safety, his turn, his childhood, until there was nothing of him left over.