Lily's hands disappeared into the trash can, crinkling past discarded mail and a folded pizza box, until her fingers found the brown paper package near the top. She pulled it free with both hands, sat down right there on the kitchen floor, and began peeling back the wrapping with the same careful concentration she'd used to make it in the first place — except now her hands were shaking, and tears kept dropping onto the paper as she worked. The drawing inside had been crumpled slightly from the fall, one corner smudged where it had landed against the discarded pizza box, but it was still, unmistakably, whole. She smoothed it flat against her knee and carried it back to the dining room, holding it out to her father with hands that trembled from crying rather than the earlier excitement. Thomas took the drawing gently, and the moment he saw what was on it, something in his chest tightened so hard it was difficult to breathe. It was a crayon drawing of three stick figures standing in front of a house — a tall figure labeled DADDY in careful, uneven six-year-old letters, a smaller figure labeled ME, and a third figure, slightly separate from the other two but still included, still drawn with the same careful crayon lines, labeled MOMMY. Above the three figures, in the wobbly rainbow letters of a child still learning to spell, Lily had written: I LOVE OUR FAMILY. "It's just a mess," Diane said again from the kitchen doorway, though her voice had lost some of its earlier certainty.