Maya almost smiled at the drawing. Tessa leaned closer; one figure had green hair because she had insisted on being a mermaid that summer. Marcus told them the school counselor had suggested family grief counseling months earlier. He had said they were managing, and now he understood that he had been wrong. He asked if they would try counseling together, not as punishment, but to learn how to speak before pain became cruelty.
Tessa sat on the opposite end of the sofa and held Claire's unopened envelope in her hands. “Can I read mine alone?”
“Absolutely,” Marcus said.
“And can I keep it?”
“It's yours.”
Tessa nodded and stood, then hesitated. She looked at the photograph of herself as a little girl, still lying on the coffee table. “Dad, can that picture stay downstairs?”
Marcus looked puzzled. “Of course.”
“I don't want you to take it away to make Maya feel better.”
“I wasn't going to.” He looked from one girl to the other. “This family didn't begin when Maya arrived, and it didn't stop being a family when Claire died. We can make room for every part of our history. We don't have to erase one daughter to include the other.”
Maya looked down at her hands. She had not realized until then that she had been hoping the old photograph would disappear. She didn't want Tessa to lose anything. She wanted proof that there was room for her, too. Those were not the same wish. She said she would like a picture of the three of them on the shelf, if Marcus didn't mind.
“Mind?” he repeated. “Maya, I would love that.”
“Not just on your phone,” she said. “In a frame.”
“In a frame,” he promised. Then, before he could add another promise to the pile of ones he had already broken, he took his phone from his pocket and made a note to buy a frame on his lunch break the next day. Both girls watched him write it down. It was such a small action that nobody commented on it. It was also the first thing he did differently.
That night Tessa sat on her bedroom floor with Claire's letter unfolded across her knees. The handwriting looked exactly as she remembered it: slightly slanted, careful, with tiny stars used as dots when Claire was being playful. Claire had written about the day Tessa taught Maya to ride a bicycle and the way Tessa had looked back after every wobbling yard to make sure her sister was still upright. She had written that Tessa was allowed to miss the years before the family changed, allowed to be angry that the world had asked her to grow up, and allowed to need her father even when someone else needed him too. Near the bottom she had added, Nobody can replace you, sweetheart. You are not the first chapter we have to close before we begin another. You are part of every chapter that comes afterward.