Concern twitched between Lily’s eyebrows before she pulled her face into a facsimile of reassurance. “Of course. Whatever you want.”

Audrey kissed Lily and Phoebe goodbye, felt the weight of their expectation linger long after they’d left.

She rolled onto her side, coughing against the fluid in her lungs she knew couldn’t be cleared. Her limbs sank into the mattress, heavy and leaden, the noises outside in the corridor—nurses, telephones, carts—muddy in her ears. She thought again of the horror on Jess’s face when she had first come in and seen them all together, and the fury in her voice as she’d instructed Mia to leave.

Audrey closed her eyes, and felt the past begin to claw at the edges of her memory.

Perhaps she had been naïve to hope that Lily and Jess might recover from the events of that summer. Perhaps the grief was too deep, the injustice too great. Perhaps there was no way to repair the heartbreak they’d endured after the losses they had suffered.

Because once upon a time there had been three little girls: Lily, Jess, and Zoe.

Chapter 34

June 1988

She sits on the side of the bed, watching her daughter sleep. It should, she knows, be a moment of maternal quietude, but it cannot be peaceful when carts are clattering outside in the corridor, when another child is wailing in the midst of injections two beds away, when the noxious combination of illness and bleach pollutes the air like a fateful specter.

It cannot be tranquil when her little girl is lying in a bed that is not her own, punctured by tubes.

Audrey chokes back her tears and commands herself to be strong. Zoe could wake at any moment.

She looks down at the pale, almost translucent skin stretched across her daughter’s cheekbones. Sometimes she fears that one day she will arrive at the hospital and the skin will have thinned so much that she will be able to watch the blood pulse through Zoe’s veins.

It has been fourteen months since Zoe was diagnosed with leukemia. They have been through more than a year of treatments no one has ever promised will be successful. For months, Audrey has oscillated between hope and despair, never knowing which will take the lead on any given day.

She brushes her fingers lightly over the back of her daughter’s hand, careful not to disturb the cannula piercing her skin. Every afternoon when she arrives the nurses remind her that Zoe needs rest, as though Audrey might have forgotten it during the previous twenty-four hours. If rest could cure her, Audrey would happily let her sleep for a year, for ten years, for however long it might take, like a princess in a fairy tale.

She sits beside Zoe’s bed, wishing she could lift up the stiff hospital sheets and climb in beside her, wrap her arms around her and hold her close until the warmth of their bodies has dissolved the space between them. She wants to feel Zoe’s skin against her cheek, feel her breath hot against her neck, sing her favorite songs—“Edelweiss,” “Castle on a Cloud,” “Dream a Little Dream of Me”—just as she has done for the past ten years.