It’s how I stumbled across Gay’s The Word, a bookstore where I found the first sci-fi book I’ve ever read with a female protagonist who falls in love with another girl. I hugged it to my chest after I finished reading, trying to cling to the spark of hope that one day I might get my own happy ending.

So much more is possible than I ever knew. I’m figuring out how to get lost and found. I’m discovering that life can take me in unexpected directions — like graduating in December, visiting Dad, and then accepting an internship offer at his engineering firm so I can spend my last semester in London before college. I’m finally getting to know Dad again and having the pleasure (or misfortune) of expanding my knowledge of pranks and dirty jokes thanks to Grandpa’s terrifying repertoire of both. I’m using every opportunity to destroy them and their friends at poker. Most of all, I got the distance from Mom that we both needed. I’m learning that I have anxiety, even if it’s not OCD, but that it’s something I can work on. It’s part of me and I’m learning to manage it one day at a time.

As for Sebastian, he’s slowly morphed from my parents’ lie of omission and the catalyst of my mom’s decline into something else: my brother.

Now that I know he existed, sometimes I let myself think about what growing up with a brother would have been like. Maybe I would have borrowed his hoodies once he got taller than me. Teased him about his crushes. Taught him to play my favorite games and had him teach me to play his. I wish he’d been there to grow up with me so maybe Mom would have been there, too. So maybe Dad would have stayed. So my family might have been different, better, whole.

And even though he never got to see this world, I wish I could tell him how much he would have been loved.

Instead, I’m navigating my future myself, sometimes well and sometimes ineptly — and learning to be okay with that.

At my internship one Friday afternoon, I manage to come up with an improvement to a testing algorithm we’ve been bogged down in for weeks. The two junior engineers I work with, Nakul and Ed, are so excited, they bounce around the room like Ping-Pong balls. We celebrate by raiding Ed’s Cadbury stash, which he reserves for special occasions such as surviving a date without saying something stupid or when the CEO nods at him in the loo. After we’re so stuffed with chocolate our stomachs hurt, Nakul calls my dad in to show him what I’ve done.