Grace nodded slow, tucking that answer away somewhere I imagine she’ll keep unpacking for years, the way I’m still unpacking it myself most nights.
Some evenings, watching her do homework at our kitchen table, tapping her foot the exact same restless way I do when I’m thinking hard about something, I catch myself talking to Naomi anyway, quiet, private, the way you talk to somebody you know can’t answer but needed to hear it regardless.
You were right, I tell her, most nights. I understand now. Not everything. But enough.
She has your laugh. She has my stubbornness. And somehow, impossibly, she has both of us in her, every single day, keeping you here in ways I don’t think either of us ever fully expected love to manage.
