I pressed my fist against my mouth as I read the article. Only two people knew the truth about what happened that night. Only one of us tried to tell it.

Emily’s coma lasted two months, and when she woke up, she was paralyzed. That was all I knew. All I’d been told. I was terrified to know more, and yet I needed to. I needed to know that somehow, in spite of what happened to her, she was okay. I was the sort of person who winced when I killed a fly. Who carried spiders outside instead of squashing them. I would never get over what happened to Emily Maxwell. But I could find no other information on her. No Facebook or Instagram or Twitter accounts—at least not accounts that were open to the public.

I finally left Google and returned with a vengeance to the restoration site I’d been studying. I could find no “lesson,” no Web site that told me step-by-step, “this is how you restore a mural.” And every site I found seemed to describe different restoration methods or offer contradictory information. Restoration was not something you learned how to do on the Internet. I read until my eyes blurred and my stomach growled with hunger. By the time I shut the computer, I was more confused than ever about where to begin on the mural.

In the kitchen pantry, I found a box of Cheerios and was lifting it from the shelf when I noticed pencil markings on the pantry’s doorjamb. I stepped closer. The markings were a height chart, and I bent over to see the lowest line. “Lisa, age 7.” There was another mark for every age, up until she hit nineteen when I assumed she had stopped growing. I remembered seeing a similar height chart in a friend’s house when I was a teenager and I felt the same envy now as I had then. This was a family that cared enough to record a child’s height, a child’s life passages. I was willing to bet this pantry had been painted numerous times over the last four decades, but the doorjamb with the pencil markings had been preserved. Treasured by Jesse Williams and his wife. Maybe by Lisa herself. The house suddenly felt like someone’s home to me. I’d been thinking of it as more of a museum, clean and a bit sterile, filled with incredibly valuable artwork. The height chart, like the handprints in the front sidewalk, told me something different. A family had lived and loved here.

I was eating the Cheerios at the kitchen table when Lisa came in the back door. She was dressed in white capris and a button-down blue chambray shirt rather than her usual polished Realtor clothing. She looked like a different woman.

“Why aren’t you at the gallery?” she asked. “You need to get cracking on the mural.”

Nope, I thought. Same woman.