There was this one time a few years ago when I was staying at Morning Glory Cottage and couldn’t find a bracelet Mom had given me for Christmas. It had been Mom’s growing up, and it was one of the few presents she’d ever given me that I hadn’t asked for but had actually liked. It was made of silver links, and attached to one of them was a bell that rang when the bracelet shook.

“There, there, darlin’,” Gram had said when she’d found me crying, pulling me into the flowy fabric of her long dress. “What is it?”

I told her what had happened and she listened, nodding seriously.

“Whenever I have a problem,” she said, “I like to retrace my steps. Go back until I figure out where things started to go wrong. Or, in this case, where I might have lost the thing I’m looking for. So, when was the last time you saw the bracelet?”

I thought hard until I remembered hearing the church bell ring that afternoon, and looking down at the bell on my wrist, shaking it to make it chime along with the real one. I had gone with Gram to read while she painted a landscape of Old Joe’s farm, and we’d been walking home through the fields.

We set out, retracing our route like Gram said, until I spotted something shiny in a muddy puddle in the middle of the bumpy farm road. The bracelet must have come loose when I’d shaken it and dropped straight off my wrist.

All I want now is for Gram to tell me how to fix things again. How to retrace my steps back to the way things were before Edie’s texts, before my diagnosis, before Gram died.

“Just remember next time,” Gram had said once the bracelet was safely around my wrist again, “that you’ve always got me, Emma. And with the two of us together, things can’t be too bad.”

But that wasn’t true, was it?

Now, when I need her more than ever, I don’t have Gram.

And it makes me wonder what else Gram said that wasn’t true, either.

On Wednesday morning, I tell Mom I’m not ready to go back to school. Which is true.

When I get up to go to the bathroom, I hear her downstairs, talking on the phone in low tones, probably to Dad, who left early for work. I know I can’t stay home forever. Eventually they’ll take me to the doctor, who will see that nothing is wrong with me. Nothing she can fix, anyway.