I closed his hand around it.
“Yes, you can.”
He cried.
So did I.
We do that less now.
But grief doesn’t leave.
It changes shape.
There are days when Jack feels 18 years away.
Then I hear one of his stupid phrases in my head, and he’s right beside me again.
I still think about the moment Theo entered the funeral.
The staring.
The whispers.
My own suspicion.
Daniel standing up.
For several minutes, almost every adult in that room thought we understood what we were looking at.
We didn’t.
We saw a teenager in a red dress at his best friend’s funeral and invented reasons before he had said a word.
Theo knew that would happen.
Jack knew it too.
He had predicted it six months earlier.
