Had Sage needed me? When my father died, Sage came straight to the house. Had I called her, or did she just come? I couldn’t remember. She was just there, every day, for a long time. She and Charlotte brought black clothes for us to wear, and Sage did Beatrice’s hair for the funeral. The one time Thomas choked out a sob, it was Sage who moved across the room to him. Charlotte sat with my aunt in the kitchen and talked and listened to stories about Dad because Mom wasn’t able to. When everyone moved away from us in those few days, kept their respectful distance, Sage came toward us. My Irish aunt was confused by our empty house. Where were all the neighbors and friends? No one made tea for us, visited, brought us food. She couldn’t understand America. Everything felt wrong to her about our world—except Sage and Charlotte, who came every day. They were the only ones who made any sense to her at all.

I had always waited for Sage to come to me. In my room, I took out the card I bought for Charlotte and wrote it to Sage instead, just one line that she would know: “Lord, I miss you.” On the envelope I wrote “Sage,” and, underneath, “Kingdom before dark?” I cut through the trail to Hamilton Drive and walked as far as her house. There were no kids gathered at the nets playing basketball, no scattered bikes on the driveway. The Mercedes was parked on the far side, by the clinic. I knocked on the kitchen door, and no one answered. I wedged the envelope between the glass and the metal frame of the storm door. I didn’t know if Sage had moved with Charlotte or was working, but if she didn’t get it today, she’d get it another day, and she would know that I finally came and looked for her.

I walked to the Kingdom then. It was nearly a year and a half since the phone call had come from Dad’s cousin in New York. I see that day in slow motion. I was outside with Ellen on the street, and Thomas called to us and we came running up the azalea path. There was the moment before the path, us on the street playing four-square with the Hunters, an in-between moment, running up through afternoon light to the pine at the top of the hill where Thomas was standing, and then Thomas’s face, telling us something terrible, forever terrible, had happened. We had run up the path, and we were one thing at the start, and we were something else on the other side, in just a few hundred yards. Walking into the house, Marie on the living room floor, my mother upstairs on her bed, crying.