She pulled Noah gently toward the side of the gate, away from the cluster of parents. She crouched down again, at his level, and looked at him carefully.

“Ethan came to see you at school,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Today?”

He considered. “And other days. He comes sometimes.”

“How many times has he come?”

Another consideration. “Lots of times. Since the beginning of school.”

Since September. The beginning of the school year. Nearly two months.

She kept her voice even. This was something she had learned in the months of managing Noah’s grief alongside her own — that her reaction to his disclosures shaped what he disclosed next, that if she responded with alarm he would close, and if she responded with careful steadiness he would continue. “Where at school does he come?”

“By the fence,” Noah said. “At the back. During outside time.”

“What does he look like? When you see him?”

Noah looked at her with the slight patience of a child addressing a question whose answer is obvious. “Like Ethan,” he said.

“Does he look the same as you remember? Same height? Same—”

“He’s bigger,” Noah said. “Ethan’s bigger now.”

She drove home with Noah in the back seat and the information in the front of her mind, and she told herself it was a coping mechanism — what the grief books said, what Dr. Okafor had prepared her for. That young children animated the dead, gave them presence in the world, communed with them in ways that served an adaptive function. That this was normal. That she should respond with warmth and validation and gently, over time, help Noah understand the difference between memory and presence.

She told herself this the entire drive home.

She did not believe it.