While I was on vacation with my cousins, my phone lit up with one message: “Get on a plane home. Don’t tell your parents you’re coming.” When I landed, an attorney and two investigators

I got into college. I saw him sleeping in a hospital chair when I had pneumonia at fifteen.

Then I saw the wrecked car.

David Pierce dying beside the road.

Laura Pierce never getting to hold me again.

Thomas Whitaker spending twenty-one years with an empty chair at every holiday.

I answered quietly, “I was never only yours.”

That was the last thing I ever continue reading …