And she’d sit on her bed and trace the raised dots of her Braille prayer book, reading the same words over and over until they stopped sounding like comfort and started sounding like a dare.
On the morning of her twenty-first birthday, she woke before dawn.
The house was quiet—no footsteps, no kitchen noise, no radio. The kind of stillness that made you listen to your own breathing.
Lily sat up, found her slippers with her toes, and moved through the familiar path from bed to dresser to chair. She ran her fingers over the book on her nightstand, the cover worn soft from years of touch. Her mother’s book, really. Lily had claimed it the way some kids claimed stuffed animals.
She was halfway down the first page when she heard her bedroom door open.
