Lily calls her Aunt Gigi and believes, with the total certainty of a six-year-old, that Gigi personally hung the moon in the sky.
Little Jack learned to walk holding onto two of her fingers across my living room floor.
On the hard days — and there are still hard days, days when I miss my husband so much that I have to sit down on the kitchen floor until I can breathe again — Grace shows up with groceries and terrible jokes and sits with me until the worst of it passes through.
I did not rebuild my life by getting rich.
I did not rebuild it by proving Vanessa wrong, or by any of the things I once believed would save me.
I rebuilt it by gaining the one thing my orphaned husband spent his entire life without.
Family.
Real, blood, show-up-on-a-Tuesday, hold-the-baby-while-you-cry family.
The gray sweater that wasn’t mine hangs in my closet now, next to my own clothes, because Grace left it that first night and I never gave it back, and she never once asked for it.
