I didn’t say anything. I have learned in this job that the most useful thing you can do with a silence is decline to fill it.

“I want to say one thing before I say the rest,” Megan said, “because if I don’t get it out now I’ll spend an hour walking around it.
“I didn’t know on the day. I want you to hear that and then I want you to hear the part that comes after it. I was sixteen, I was in that room, I heard the word leukemia and I heard the word Stanford and I did not have the equipment to put them next to each other. I genuinely thought you were going into some state program and coming home. That’s the truth about the day.”

“And after the day?”

“I knew within a year.” She said it flatly. “Dad and Mom had a fight in the kitchen in the spring. I was on the stairs. I heard enough. I put it together.”

“You were seventeen.”

“I was seventeen,” Megan agreed. “And then I was eighteen, and twenty-two, and twenty-eight, and thirty-four. I was seventeen for one of those years, Emily. I’ve been a fully grown adult with a job and a car and a lawyer’s phone number for the other twelve, and I did not do one single thing.”