“Tonight I have plans to do dinner with Jenny. Your dad has dinner with Joe, and I do dinner with Jenny. It’s a little routine we’ve gotten into. Sometimes we all do something together, but tonight it’s us girls.”

I nod slowly as comprehension dawns. “Ah.”

Again, I think about how many times I tried to get my parents to move because I thought they needed some other kind of life. Even though I didn’t have my own figured out. Probably because I didn’t have my own figured out.

“You are welcome to join us, and in fact, I think it would mean a lot to her. To me. To you. To all of us.”

I haven’t seen or spoken to either of Aimee’s parents since the night we left for the party. When Jenny tossed Aimee the keys and said, Drive carefully, sweetie.

Now that I remember it was raining, I remember that she actually said more after that. I mentally squint to find the words.

Drive carefully, sweetie. It’s supposed to rain later. Maybe let Meg drive?

Mom! had been Aimee’s only reply and last word to Jenny.

I stare at Dido, who is happily basking in the sun.

Then to my mom, “Okay. I’ll come.”

Three hours later, I’m showered and covered in aloe lotion after underestimating the power of the sun—for five days in a row—and wearing a borrowed matching set of what my mom calls her loungewear to go over to Aimee’s parents’ house.

“I don’t know why I’m so nervous,” I say to my mom as we drive down familiar, half-forgotten roads in her years-old SUV.

“It’s natural,” she says with a shrug that puts me, strangely, at ease.

Pulling up to the house makes my heart skip several beats in a row, my nervous system well aware of the last time I was here.

Thirty-three Blue Daze Lane. There it is. Aimee’s house.

The house looks so similar, and yet the differences are startling. Time has worn the place into something new. Something more settled. The flowers and trees around the house are bigger and older now, making it impossible to think I was only here yesterday.

It’s then I realize that the set that was built for Aimee’s play was mimicking a version of this house that hasn’t existed in a decade. Like she didn’t truly know how much it had changed.

As if she hadn’t been home in so long. As if her last memories were of the house when she was nineteen too.

The realization gives me chills. It’s like she was a ghost, only knowing what she knew when she died. And hadn’t she been, in a way?

I think of Cillian and Kiera and Maureen and have to shut my eyes hard to stop from crying.