“Sam,” I said. I was done with Mom not being able to say his name. “You mean Sam.”

“Yes,” said Mom. “What happened to . . . Sam . . .”

“Yeah?”

“You can’t go back and fix it. You can’t change what’s already past.”

I rose to my knees on the bed. “I know that,” I said. I was ready to scream. I felt like they weren’t hearing anything I said. “But I’m not trying to change the past. I’m trying to change the present. For all of us. All you have to do is say yes. You can say yes. It’s like . . . an actual magic word.”

Then we heard a cough, and we all turned together to find Jasper standing in the doorway in my blue flowered nightgown.

“Hi,” she said matter-of-factly. She looked different somehow, younger than usual, though her legs were too long for the nightgown.

“Hello,” Dad replied awkwardly, with a little wave.

“I rolled up the sleeping bag,” said Jasper. “And I wondered where you wanted me to put it.”

She sounded brave to me. She sounded like herself. Like a girl who is going to do a hard thing, and is used to doing hard things. But then she put her hands on her hips awkwardly, like she wasn’t sure what to do with them.

She was scared.

All around me then, there was a pause. It was like the whole room held its breath. An unbearably long breath. I glanced back and saw that my parents were staring at each other.

“Please?” I whispered. My voice was shaky in my throat. “Please?”

My dad reached out, put a hand on my back. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

In the doorway, Jasper shifted from foot to foot.

Then, out of nowhere, my mom suddenly said, “Huh!” Like she’d had a new thought.

“Rach?” asked my dad.

She turned to him and locked eyes. “Paul,” she said. “Do you remember what you told me when I was scared we weren’t ready to get married, but you wanted to run off to Vegas?”

Dad’s eyes softened, but they were still fixed on Mom. His voice was low when he said, “I told you we could handle anything if we were together.”

“That’s right,” said Mom. And it was funny because the moment felt sort of romantic, but her voice was sharp, like she was on a phone call for work. “You weren’t afraid of risks back then. Or messes. You used to throw whole buckets of paint at a canvas and tell me we could worry about the floor later, remember that? You used to take me on road trips without a map or a destination. You used to do all kinds of crazy things. Remember?”

Dad nodded. “I do,” he said. “And then there was that night on the mountain above Chattanooga . . .” He grinned at her.

Mom blushed.