Ethan stood in the aisle beside me. He did not look at the crowd. He looked at the photograph in my hands.
I reached for him. He leaned down. I held him the way I used to hold both of them when they were small enough to fit against me at the same time, one on each side, two halves of a whole I had carried beneath my heart for nine months.
One half was standing in a red dress in a high school auditorium.
The other half was smiling in a wallet-sized photograph, bald and bright and defiant, wearing the same dress, in a hospital bed, eleven months ago.
We graduated, Mom. Both of us. Together.
Both of them. Together.
Part 3 — What Lily Was Like
I need to tell you about Lily because she deserves to exist in this story as more than the girl who died. She was not a tragedy. She was a person. And the difference between those two things is the distance between a headline and a life.
