Clare took a breath and held it. She remembered that day, standing next to Eileen, their mother still in her cop uniform just home from her shift. “Your father is back in the hospital… They don’t think he’ll be coming home this time.”

She remembered her mother unfastening her duty belt, placing it on the table, removing the gun from the holster, checking the safety, and walking it back to the bedroom, where she kept her gun safe behind the folding closet door. It wasn’t her mother’s words that had made Clare’s heart stop in her chest that day; it was the resignation of her tone. As if their father were already dead.

Clare had left her little sister standing there, sobbing and hiccupping alone over the back of their polyester couch, and wandered two doors down to Adam and Kaylee’s house. Adam was in the front yard, digging a hole with a stick in one of the many dirt patches where their lawn stubbornly refused to fill in. He looked up, his eyes on hers, the second he heard her tread-worn sneakers on the cracked concrete walk.

“What’s wrong?” he asked when he noticed her tears. Standing up, he dropped his stick.

Later, in the tree house Adam and Kaylee’s father had built for Christmas four years ago, Adam had given her his birthday present two days early, hoping it would help cheer her up and take her mind off her father dying in the hospital two miles away.

“What should I write in it?” she asked him.

Adam, his head in her lap, looked up at her with his bright blue eyes and smiled. “Tell me a story, Clare. You always make up the best stories. You should write them down.”

Later, standing beneath the tree, long past when it had gone dark and Clare was expected to be home, Adam kissed her lips for the first time. She could still remember that first soft press of his mouth against hers, the moment they became more than best friends, the moment everything between them changed forever.

Later that night, after Eileen had finished crying herself to sleep on the other side of their shared bedroom, Clare wrote her first words in her first journal. Mama said Daddy isn’t coming home. The next three pages had poured out of her as she had sat upright, her diary resting on her knees under the covers of her bed, straining to keep her words on the lines with only the soft glow of their night-light to help her.

Their father had died the very next morning. He was thirty-one.

Clare closed her first journal and placed it next to her on the white shag rug; she was now seven years older than her father had been when he died, alone, in that hospital room.