Dylan tells me on a Thursday morning.

  He heard from a mutual connection, someone who knew Sebastian slightly, who reached out with the kind of careful message that starts with I wasn’t sure if you’d want to know.

  I’m in the kitchen making tea when he comes in.

  “Lira,” he says.

  I know from his voice before he says anything else.

  “What happened,” I say.

  He tells me. Sebastian. A car accident, two nights ago. He’s been gone two days and I’m only finding out now, and somewhere in that fact is something I’ll sit with later.

  I stand at the counter.

  “Okay,” I say.

  Dylan watches my face.

  “Do you want to—”

  “Give me a minute,” I say.

  He nods. He leaves the kitchen. He has always known when to leave the room and I have been grateful for that for twenty years.

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  I stand at the counter and I hold my cup and I look out at the garden.

  Sebastian.

  I let myself remember him once. All the way from the beginning, before everything went wrong. There was warmth in him. Real warmth. It just ran in the wrong direction. He gave it to whoever made him feel chosen and forgot to give it to the people already there.

  Sebastian didn’t stop me when I walked out. Sometimes silence says everything. He didn’t even ask me to take Elise.

  Elise.

  The thought arrives and doesn’t leave the way it usually does.

  She exists in my life as a sealed room. Has for years. I know the room is there. I walk past it. I don’t go in.

  But her father is dead. And Elise is.

  How old is she now. Twenty, twenty-one. I already forgot.

  Is she okay.

  The sentences I always use come automatically. She seemed okay. Young people are resilient. She has her own life.

  I remember when she came to me, twice. She found me but I don’t have any words for her the first time we met in years. She already grown so much. I want to tell her that but when she saw Dylan, she looked taken aback and shocked. She lied that she mistaken me for someone she knew.

  Then she came again the second time, which is the last. She asked me questions if I was happy now and I do. I really am. I thought she’d tell me about herself but after those questions, she left.

  Dylan comes back in. He stands in the doorway.

  “Are you alright?”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  He comes to me. Puts his arm around me. I lean into him and I look at the garden and I think about a girl who found me outside a coffee shop and said Mom? and I said oh and she said she had the wrong person and I let her walk away.

  I should find out if she’s okay.

  The unease sits in my chest like something that has been waiting a long time for me to notice it.

  I don’t put it away.

  Not this time.