She leaned in, kissed me. “I do. Thank you.”

I wanted to keep kissing her, but it wasn’t that kind of a kiss. “What will you do now?”

Sylvie looked into my eyes. “What will you do, Doubting Thomas?”

I waited for her to ask about the article. She didn’t. We went up to the hotel room, I packed my bag, gave Moose a final scratch behind his ears.

“Where will you go?” Sylvie asked at the door.

“I’ll get another room for the night. Check on Mom tomorrow then take a flight back to LA.”

“Consider staying in Portland.”

My heart hammered. “Why?”

“Maybe it’s time to revisit the past and put it to rest. You’re a good man, Thomas. You deserve happiness.”

Again, it struck me, despite wishing for more, that Sylvie’s true gift had always been kindness. I held her one last time and then walked away. Was there anything other than goodbye in the way she hugged me back? I’ve gone over it in my head, again and again. I’ll probably never know.

I’ve spent the past two days in my family’s old home, wandered an apartment with photographs of a happy family forever fractured on the walls. Faced my guilt about Dad and Deacan’s deaths, the horror of their last moments. None of it was my fault—I was just a kid who wanted ice cream. But accepting that has been hard. I’ve taken responsibility for Dad and Deacan’s tragedy almost my whole life. But the worst part is that Mom and I never recovered. I can’t change how she feels about Deacan, that he was her favorite son, or the fact that there’s a part of her that may always blame me for that night, but I can change how I react to her fragilities. I can try to be kind, too.

It felt strange to sleep in my childhood bedroom, once shared with Deacan, a sliding wall constructed in the center when he got old enough to need privacy. Mom kept his old school newspaper articles in a thick album beneath his bed. Over the past twenty-four hours, I’ve read them all. He would’ve been a good journalist, maybe a great one. Sylvie tells her audiences that their loved ones are at peace; that they want us to be at peace with their deaths, too. That’s something I’ll have to work toward.

In the closet on my side of the room, I found a box of stories I’d written in elementary school, before I switched to the school newspaper in a bid to fill Deacan’s shoes. I’ve read them, too. They were about dragons, epic battles on alien planets, animals that could speak, a sorcerer who became the white rabbit in his own top hat. Each had an element of magic. Before Dad and Deacan died, I’d been a believer in the impossible.

At the bottom of the box was the leather journal I once stole. The one Dad made me return and my big brother bought and stashed beneath my pillow. Deacan’s note was on the first page: I believe in you, kid. The irony didn’t escape me. I accused three psychics of being impostors, frauds, but spent the past two decades trying to be my big brother in a bid to keep a part of him alive.