I had lived in that grief for thirteen years.
I had learned to function inside it. I had learned to make school lunches and attend parent-teacher conferences and laugh at the right moments and be present for my daughter in all the ways she needed me to be present, while carrying, underneath all of that, the permanent, low-grade weight of everything that had been lost.
Emily. Carl. The family that had existed for five years and then stopped existing in the span of one ordinary Tuesday afternoon in March.
Thirteen years.
And then my father came to find me in the kitchen on the night of Lily’s eighteenth birthday, and he looked pale, and he said he had done something terrible, and everything I thought I understood about those thirteen years turned out to be a room I had been living in with the lights off.
Let me tell you about the girls first.
Because you cannot understand any of what came after without understanding what they were, the two of them, in the five years before everything changed.
