“No. I mean falling stars. I have this bizarre memory of stars falling right out of the sky and landing in the sea. I remember the glow of them. And the sound they made when they hit the water. And I remember this voice saying, ‘Look at the stars.’ ”

“What kind of voice?” Willa asks, and I shrug.

“My mother’s voice, I guess. I can’t ever hear it when I’m awake.” There’s this gulf of hurt that opens up inside of me and I guess Willa can feel it, because she puts her arm around me and pulls me close. It’s a little weird at first, but then I relax. And it feels good to be held like that. By her. “I told you it didn’t make any sense. But I dream about it all the time. For as long as I can remember. Those falling stars. And that voice.”

“Nicole had the most beautiful voice,” Willa tells me, and I hear that same ache in her words. The one I feel in my heart. It’s like the hurt is a magnet. It pulls us together. I let my head fall against her shoulder, and she sighs. “It’s one of the first things I noticed when we met.”

“I wish I could remember what she sounded like.” I sigh, too. A soft sound that matches Willa’s. “I wish I could remember anything about her.”

“You don’t remember her voice at all?” Willa seems so surprised, but I just shake my head. “You’ve never heard it on tape or anything?”

“We don’t have any videos,” I explain. “Dad says they were all in a computer file that got deleted somehow.” Secretly, I’ve always wondered if maybe he erased them from our lives on purpose, like he erased everything else about her.

“What about your grandmother?” she asks. “Nicole’s mother. Surely she—”

I cut her off. “She died not long after my mother did. I’d only been out of the hospital a few weeks when it happened.”

“Wow,” Willa says, and the softness of the word gets absorbed by the old wood of the barn. “I can understand. To lose a child like that. Her heart must have been literally broken.”

“Dad says we need to move on,” I tell her. “That I need to move on. Forget about it, but . . .” I hesitate, because I’m never sure how to explain the way I feel about all of this. “How do you forget something you can’t even remember in the first place?”

“I have some videos of Nicole,” Willa tells me. “Really old ones from college, but some from that last summer, too. I’ll dig them up and we can watch them together.”

My heart is in my throat. I have to talk around it. “I’d like that.”