Diane calls every week.
She is not the woman who took my daughter; she is the woman who kept her alive and loved, and when the truth is this heavy, you learn to hold onto the people who were lied to right alongside you.
People ask me how I survived burying a child and then un-burying her.
I tell them the truth.
I didn’t survive it.
My son did.
A five-year-old stood on a riverbank and saw something no one would believe, and he carried it, wordless, for eight years, until he was finally big enough and brave enough to point across a dinner table and give his sister back her life.
Jeremy and Janice were born eleven minutes apart.
He came first.
She came second, already reaching.
And it turns out that the whole time the world thought one of them was lost, the other one was simply holding the door — silent, patient, waiting for the moment he could open his mouth and bring her home.
