Lily lived. She’s twenty-three now, and she’s done all the things she never got to do — she runs, she dances, she has ordinary days, dozens and hundreds of them, every one of them a gift my son gave her. She calls me Mom. Not Grace. Mom. She asked if she could, a year in, crying, afraid it would hurt me, and it was the opposite of hurting me. My son gave me a daughter, exactly as he planned, and she carries him with her everywhere, in the most literal way a person can carry another.
Diane and I are inseparable. My son was right about that too — of course he was; he saw it before either of us did. Two mothers, each with one child, brought together by a single heart. She’s my best friend. We spend holidays together, all four of us, the family my son assembled
