“That’s right. I didn’t do anything.” He reaches for my hand again. “And I’m the one who should be sorry. I should’ve been better. I should’ve talked with you more honestly so that you would’ve understood this wasn’t something that you could fix. Your sister is gone, Cora. It is a tragedy. An unspeakable tragedy. But she is gone, and I’m so, so sorry.”

His words are like the slamming of a door. The final grade on an exam.

Mabel’s death feels more real to me in this moment than it ever has. Even when I watched her get lowered into the ground, there was a part of me that didn’t believe that was my sister in that white cloth shroud.

But now—now I’ve run out of places to hide. This room suddenly feels very small like the walls are closing in on me. I let out a strangled sound.

Dad’s eyes fill with concern. He keeps holding on to my hand. “I know it’s hard, Cora. And I should’ve . . . I should’ve talked with you more. I should’ve never let it get to this point.”

“It just doesn’t seem right that there’s nothing we can do.”

Dad fidgets. His feet shuffle on the ground. “That’s one of the hardest things about death. It’s never going to be okay, but we’ll always have our love for her. And we’ll always have the love she had for us.”

“She’s really gone.”

Dad wipes his eyes. “She’s really gone. But she’s also still with us. Her love, our love, we have that. It’s with us.”

I look at the wires that are attached to my body. I watch the beeping on the monitor. The jagged lines that show I’m alive. The line that’s now flat for my sister. That will always be flat. “Can I tell you something?”

“Of course, kiddo. Anything.”

I roll my tongue over my teeth. “You and Grams always say those things. Like we’ll always have our love. And I know that. I do. But it still doesn’t make it seem okay. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I understand those things and those phrases, but I also don’t.”

Dad pinches the space between his eyebrows. He lets out a deep breath. “I get what you’re saying. And I’m not sure what to say. But I’m going to offer this up, and if it’s not helpful, feel free to ignore me.”

I give him a tiny, teasing smile. “Mabel was always better at that.”

“True,” Dad says with a laugh that’s more sad than happy. “So, in the world of science, we have imperfect theories that are still studied and accepted. Have I ever talked to you about this before?”

I shake my head.

“Well, it’s discussed a lot when we talk about Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation. The theory that Newton came up with works. By that, I mean it bears out mathematically. You can chart it. But as we started to learn more about the world, we realized that what Newton philosophized isn’t at all what’s actually happening with the particles on a physical level. And Newton’s laws of motion were replaced with Einstein’s theory of relativity, and someday, Einstein’s theory of relativity may be replaced. Scientific knowledge, as a whole, is basically a collection of imperfect theories that are always changing and evolving as we learn more about the universe.”