I moved back in the first week of December.
Not just me.
Lily too.
We’d talked about it for weeks. Me and Ethan and Dad and Dr. Okonkwo and Lily. Especially Lily. We asked her what she wanted. She thought about it very seriously for two whole days.
“Can Grandpa still pick me up from school on Wednesdays?” she asked.
“Yes,” Dad said.
“And can I sleep over at Grandpa’s on Friday nights?”
“Yes.”
“And can Ruby come?”
“Ruby definitely has to come,” I said.
“Okay,” Lily said. “Then yes.”
We turned the little office at the end of the hall in our townhouse into her bedroom. Ethan and I painted it yellow. Megan’s yellow. Lily picked the exact shade from a hundred paint samples at the hardware store. It was called Buttercup Morning.
We hung her horse drawings on the walls. We put her moon nightlight in the outlet by her bed. We put a photograph of Megan on her nightstand, in a yellow frame. Megan in her yellow rain boots, holding a baby Lily, both of them laughing.
The first night Lily slept there, she came into our bedroom at two in the morning and climbed into bed between us.
“Bad dream,” she mumbled.
“Okay, bug,” Ethan said, half asleep.
She curled up between us and fell asleep in about thirty seconds.
I lay there in the dark, listening to the two of them breathe. Ethan on one side. Lily in the middle.
For six years, I’d thought I was waiting for something that might never come.
It turned out it had been there the whole time. On Saturdays. Behind a fake friend named Walter. In my father’s house, in my old bedroom, with a moon nightlight.
I’d just never been allowed to see it.
Christmas Eve came.
