Glenn picks up the charred handbell off my dresser and transfers it between his hands.

“It’s hard watching someone you love in pain. You’d take their hurt in a heartbeat, but you can’t. It’s their pain.”

“How did you guys do it? I mean with me. Sara was gone. I was…me. How did you stand it?”

Cora takes the bell from Glenn and rubs her fingers across the blackened surface.

“We had to,” she says quietly.

“Because I needed you?”

“Because we needed you.”

“You needed me?”

Cora swallows hard, reaching up to hold Glenn’s hand. “I was a mother without a child. You were the one thing that kept the weight of that from crushing me. I needed you, Ava.”

Cora pauses like she’s waiting for more breath.

“I still need you,” she says. “If anything ever happened to you—”

I put my hand on her arm.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

Cora smiles and slides her thumb along the scarred ridges of my fingers.

“Do you remember each time you would get a new graft? How we knew it was going to take?”

I think back to the white patches of skin sewn into my body. How the nurses would change the dressings, day after day, always checking to see if my body was going to accept or reject this new piece of me.

And then, one day, little pink pinhead dots would appear.

“When the buds appeared, we knew.”

Cora nods. “Once it connected to the heart, it had a chance.” Her small, manicured fingers envelop my hand, toe and flipper and all. “You’re grafted into our hearts now. Permanently stitched together.”

Cora hugs me and Glenn kisses me on the top of my head. He stops at my door to flick off the lights like he always does, his profile silhouetted against the light.

In the dark, my mind whirs with thoughts of Piper. How am I going to help her? How can I make up for the terrible things I said? And how can I face the hallways—let alone the stage—without her?

I put on my headphones, hit the Fire Mix and play Piper’s self-proclaimed anthem.

She’s a phoenix in a flame—

a hellfire raging from within,

her story written on her skin.

Once broken, now she flies—

soaring above everything.

She conquered her demons,

and wore her scars like wings.

An hour later, I still can’t sleep. I listen to Mom’s deodorant voice mail, but when it’s over, I think about Piper, and the darkness creeps in again. I write in my therapy journal, but the dark won’t go. Rather than fight it alone, I grab the Wizard of Oz DVD and knock on the door across the hall.

When Cora tells me to come in, I find Glenn lying propped up on a pile of pillows with Cora leaning against him, watching some TV documentary.