herself to face me until she’d finally decided the promise mattered more than her fear.
I sat down on the little bench near Emily’s headstone, and Margaret sat beside me, and before I opened the envelope, she told me the story I’d spent a decade not knowing.
“My son’s name was Michael,” she said. “He was nineteen. He met your Emily the summer before everything happened. I didn’t know much about her at the time — Michael was private about her, the way kids are when something is real and new and they don’t want anyone touching it yet. But he was happy, Diane. That whole summer, my son was happy in a way I hadn’t seen him in years.
Then Michael was killed. A car accident, that August. Nineteen years old, and gone in a single afternoon.
I fell into a grief I didn’t think I’d survive. I barely left
