Sylvie waits a beat then asks, “Do you want me to go with you?”

“. . . Please.”

She drives. Chris curls in my arms, her body trembling. Moose hangs over the seat, watches us. “Why wouldn’t he let me near her?”

Rain pounds. Sylvie turns the windshield wipers to high and passes a pickup truck, stays in the faster lane. “My first dog lived to sixteen,” she says. “One day I couldn’t find him. He’d crawled under the porch to die. I was devastated he’d been alone but Dad said animals know when it’s their time to go, and my dog hadn’t wanted me to watch him suffer or prolong his life. Animals are intuitive. I think Moose was honoring Chris’s wishes.”

My heart might splinter into a thousand shards. “I loved Chris from the moment we brought her home. Deacan did, too, but when we did homework, she’d curl in my lap, not his. At night, she’d pick me; sleep in the crook of my arm. She always chose me.”

Sylvie stares straight ahead. The car’s beams stretch beneath an oppressive, starless sky. “What happened with your mom the night Deacan and your dad died?”

Why is she asking me this now?

Sylvie passes a semi and a sheet of water hits the windshield, momentarily blinds us. She doesn’t flinch. “When Eve broke the radio, what’d you overhear?”

She’s driving well over the speed limit and we hydroplane across a deep puddle, lose traction for a moment. I grip the armrest. “Why does it matter?”

“It matters to you.”

I shrug like what I’m about to say means nothing. “Mom said it should’ve been me. She wished I’d died instead of Deacan.” The words I’ve never said aloud taste like poison. I wait for Sylvie to tell me that it was grief talking, but she doesn’t. She wouldn’t lie to me about that.

“Your mom may never choose you first,” she says. “But Chris always did. Now it’s your turn.”

The truth of it all is a punch to the gut. Sylvie could’ve bludgeoned me with it or manipulated. Instead, in this moment when I’m most vulnerable, she’s kind. I haven’t been. Shame for the way I treated her in the hospital stairwell floods me. “I was such an asshole. What I said—”

“Is what you believe, right?”

“Yeah,” I admit. “But I was also humiliated and really fucking sad.”

Again, Sylvie doesn’t try to convince me I’m wrong about my mother’s love. Instead, she says, “Guilt has a thousand different faces.”

Our conversation from the previous night flows back . . .

I told Sylvie that Deacan didn’t get to live his dream.

You can’t live it for him, she pointed out.

If not me, then who?

None of them want that . . .

I didn’t think Sylvie understood that embracing Deacan’s dream of being a journalist was a way to make up for my part in his death. But she had understood that, and more, all along. “Mom and I aren’t so different, are we?” Sylvie waits for me to say it. “In our own way we both wanted to keep Deacan alive.”