“We’ll all miss Gram,” Dad says, nudging me with an elbow. “But you had a special connection with her. There’s no denying that.”

I wince. I had a special connection? Now that Gram’s gone, is that gone, too? An image flashes through my mind of the frayed tire swing rope over the river that snapped in two one summer when I tried to kick too high, sending me plunging into the water.

“To Gram,” Dad says, raising his glass. I clink mine against his.

Dad’s milk leaves him with a frosty mustache that makes me giggle, just a little. He leans over and plants a milky kiss in my knotted hair.

“I’m sorry she’s gone, Emma,” Dad says as he stands to go back to bed. “We’ll miss her a lot, won’t we?”

“Yeah,” I say. “We will.”

I stay at the table for a while after he leaves, thinking about how there are two kinds of missing.

There’s the kind when you’ve lost something important and can’t find it no matter how hard you look. Like when you can’t find your homework and the teacher’s walking around to collect it, and the closer she gets, the more you panic.

And then there’s the kind when you know where something is, but you just can’t get to it. Like after you come back from summer camp and you wish you could go back for just one more day. You wish so hard it makes your insides ache.

It sounds impossible, but I think I miss Gram both ways.

When I go back upstairs, I don’t return to my own bedroom. Instead, I creep into Gram’s. And I’m not the only one. Boomer is there, too, lying at the foot of her bed. When he sees me, he cries and thumps his tail at the same time, like he’s both happy it’s me and sorry it isn’t Gram.

He scooches over as I climb under Gram’s sheets, still unmade from the last night she slept here before she went to the hospital. The smell of her is so strong it makes my eyes water. It smells like wishing.

I burrow deeper as my eyes fall upon the book lying open on the velvet armchair beside the bed. It’s framed in a square of moonlight, so you can see the cracks in the old spine.

I’m sure you’ve heard of The World at the End of the Tunnel by R. M. Wildsmith. It’s one of those books like Alice in Wonderland or Peter Pan. Everyone kind of knows the story, but most people have never actually read it.