Grief does not arrive like a storm you can see coming. It slips in quietly, settling into corners of the house, into the pauses between breaths, into the moments when you instinctively reach for someone who is no longer there. Three weeks after my daughter Lily died, I was still moving through the world as if I were underwater. Sounds were muffled. Colors dulled. Time bent and stretched in strange ways. Some hours passed without my noticing; others felt endless. Lily had been ten years old—an age full of opinions and laughter and fierce affection.

She loved sunflowers because they “always looked like they were smiling,” and she had a habit of humming while she drew, as if the pencil needed music to work properly. On the morning she died, she had worn her favorite yellow sweater, the one with the tiny pearl buttons that she insisted made her feel “brave and bright.” She had buckled herself into the passenger seat, chatting about her art class and whether her sunflower needed more orange or more gold. I remember standing in the doorway, coffee cooling in my hand, watching my husband Daniel back the car out of the driveway. I remember Lily waving through the windshield.