“You might not think less of me for it,” Sophie allowed, “but I will. It’s going to be awful, and I’ll probably cry before the day is over, but I have to do it. Not for Harrison or even for Oscar, but for me.”

To her surprise, Dawn laughed—her familiar chuckle full of music, her dangling silver earrings shaking around her neck. “Well, crap. I can’t argue with that. Lila?”

Her oldest sister offered a prim smile. “I could argue it, but I’m not going to. I know better than to go up against Sophie in battle. She wins every time. She always has.”

Dawn heaved a mock sigh. “She does, doesn’t she? The tenacious wretch. I’d hate her if I didn’t love her so much.”

“Wait—I do? I am? You really mean it?” Sophie looked back and forth between her sisters, waiting for the catch. “You aren’t just calling me a tenacious wretch to be nice?”

She couldn’t tell which of her sisters laughed the most at that, but she did know that the sound out it far outstripped their earlier sympathy. It always had. During her darkest moments and in the midst of her bleakest fears, Lila and Dawn had always managed to make her laugh.

Just thinking about it caused tears to spring to her eyes—not for her plight, but for Harrison’s. When his world had taken the same path as hers, no one had made him laugh. No one had showed him love.

And now he won’t even let me try.

“Sophie, you’re a lot of things, but a quitter isn’t one of them,” Lila said. They all knew, without words, what Lila meant. Although all of their lives had been shaped by Sophie’s childhood illness, it wasn’t something they discussed in the general way of things—mostly because Sophie wouldn’t let them. She was tired of living in the past, exhausted with trying to prove herself worthy of this life she’d been given. “I think every single person in this room can agree about that.”

“Without a doubt,” Dawn agreed.

As if by tacit consent, the three sisters looked to the one person in the room they weren’t so sure of—their mother, who was watching them with an air of bewilderment and a frown pulling a line down her forehead.

“Don’t you agree, Mom?” Dawn prodded.

“Girls, you’re kidding, right?” That frown was pointed at each of them in succession, full of maternal solicitude and concern. Sophie felt her heart sink, sure she was about to be reduced to the barest minimum yet again—and just as sure that she was going to have to continue being a soft, overprotected piece of fluff for as long as her mother lived.