It took emotional fortitude to enter Michael’s old room, too. It still felt like it was his. She would stare up at the glow-in-the-dark stars he’d attached to the ceiling with her dad, who bought them for Michael shortly after he’d moved in with them. She couldn’t believe nobody had ever gotten rid of Michael’s stuff after what he’d done. His T-shirts were still folded in the drawer. The bookshelves held his track trophies, the desk was stuffed with old math quizzes he’d aced. The giant aquarium that used to fill up the room with its comforting hum and eerie, wet light sat empty on the table.

Michael’s rolled-up balls of socks reminded her of when she’d teased him because he always wore his socks inside out. He explained that his mother, shortly before she died, told him that whenever he was sad, all he had to do was wear his socks inside out and he’d feel happy again.

Michael, Michael … She had so many questions for him, so much she wanted to say, so much anger. But alone in his room, a room she knew her parents had left untouched because they wanted him to come back, like all of their bedrooms—she only wished that he were there to mourn with her. Sure, he’d left, but she’d left, too, only for different reasons.

So much had changed, yet Poppy still felt stuck in that hard time when Noah was a baby, when the atmosphere in the small home often grew tense, loud and anxious. Sleep-deprived, her parents had snapped at each other. Poppy withdrew and started sleeping at her friends’ houses, escaping to their cottages, tripping at music festivals on the weekends, using drugs to escape. Everyone was too stressed and exhausted to worry about her.

The longer she stayed in the house, the more she pieced together her reasons for leaving, and why she hadn’t come back, save for that one awful visit. She’d once felt integral to her family. After Michael’s adoption and the trauma of his exit, along with the birth of Noah, she’d been rendered invisible, insignificant, especially by Ann, who’d never confided in her except to share details about her body.

Normally private and self-conscious, Ann was surprisingly open about childbirth. She told Poppy about the stitches from her episiotomy zigzagging all the way to her ass, explained how her breasts hardened into hot, hard boulders. When the milk came in, Poppy made warm compresses to set on her painfully infected nipples. She nursed so much she walked around the house with her nursing bra unstrapped, the flaps up, right in front of their father.

Ann had a hard time burning off the baby weight. Poppy inadvertently set off a fit of tears when Ann saw her walking from the bathroom to her bedroom wearing only her bra and underwear. “What’s wrong?” Poppy asked.