He talked about Ethan. This was something Elana had been told to expect — that young children integrated loss differently, that the dead remained present in their conversation and their play in ways that adults sometimes found difficult to navigate. Noah would say, at dinner, that Ethan used to hate this food. Or at the park that Ethan could go higher on the swings, a fact delivered not with grief but with the informational matter-of-factness of a younger sibling who has spent his life cataloguing the capabilities of an older one. Elana received these moments as the complicated gifts they were — they hurt, and they were also the closest she could get, in ordinary minutes, to having Ethan still present in the room.

She had not been sleeping. Six months in, she was averaging four or five hours on good nights, less on bad ones, which meant she was functioning on a chronic deficit that expressed itself in a blunted quality to her days — sounds slightly too loud, light slightly too bright, the edge of every sensation filed down. Her doctor had recommended therapy. She had begun seeing someone, a grief counselor named Dr. Okafor, who had the specific quality of listening that meant she heard the thing you said and also the thing you meant, which was occasionally uncomfortable and usually necessary.

It was a Tuesday in October, six months and eleven days after the accident, when she went to pick up Noah from kindergarten and he said the thing that changed everything.

Part Two: My Brother Came

The kindergarten was three blocks from their house — close enough to walk on good days, which meant most days now that autumn had brought the particular clear, cool air that she had always loved about October and that this October she mostly noticed as a quality of light.

She arrived at the usual time, two forty-five, joining the small cluster of parents at the gate. The other parents had been, for the first months, careful with her — the specific careful of people who know that someone in their social vicinity is carrying something very heavy and do not want to add to the weight, which expressed itself as slightly longer eye contact and slightly fewer casual complaints about ordinary inconveniences. She appreciated it and found it, occasionally, slightly suffocating, in the way that all forms of care can become suffocating when they remind you too consistently of what is being cared about.