“What?” my dad asked, eyes widening. The pan slid out of his hand and fell into the sink with a deafening crash. “What happened? How did he die?”

I was too shocked to say anything at all. Griffin died last night. But he couldn’t have. I’d seen him last night, playing Marco Polo, eating hot dogs at our neighborhood’s Labor Day party.

Dad leaned closer to Mom, like he thought he’d heard her wrong, he must have heard her wrong, before she started crying silently, her hand over her lips. Then he glanced over at us, as if just now realizing that we were still sitting there, watching. “Clara, Emily, head up to your rooms, okay?”

“What about school?” Emily asked. “We have to leave in, like, ten minutes.”

My father shot her a look as he placed both his hands on Mom’s shoulders, squeezing as she cried into the phone receiver.

I looked over my shoulder, through the window to the Tomlins’ house across the street, almost expecting there to be visual proof of this impossible event—that Griffin was dead, that he was really gone. But all I saw were the same two police cars still parked alongside the curb, the crime-scene tape fluttering in the breeze.

A hollowness opened in my chest as I heard my mother tearfully ask what had happened to him . . . we’d just seen him the night before, and he’d been fine. Then a numbness settled into my fingers and extended to my arms and my legs and everywhere in between. I slumped against the back of the chair and listened to the faint sound of the hysterical voice through the phone, feeling as if nothing was sinking in. Everything felt blank and unreal.

Griffin Tomlin was dead.

chapter two

four months later

I heard my mother entering the house through the patio door downstairs from my bedroom, the shwoop of the door closing behind her, and the clomping of her boots against the floor as she maneuvered around the table and chairs in the dining room. I imagined her peeling off her dirt-caked gardening gloves as she walked into the kitchen, past a chair no one sat in anymore, and dropping them on the counter.

In the three months since Emily had been arrested, my mother had become more obsessed with gardening than ever before, spending hours outside as she tugged out weeds, planted autumn flowers, and filled her watering can with the hose. The head of her trowel was dented and white at the edges from scratching against pebbles in the dirt, and the elastic of her gardening gloves was worn and stretched. The back of her neck was sunburned from spending so many hours tending to the flower beds. They used to bloom with vibrant petals but now, in January, there was nothing for her to plant. Nothing for her to nurture.