Every boutique in our county had a different way of saying no. That size wasn’t in stock. The floor samples ran small. There was always a website we could try instead. My daughter Marlow never complained, but I watched each polite refusal settle into her shoulders, and by the fourth shop she’d stopped looking at the racks at all. She was seventeen, and she was already carrying more than any girl her age should have to. Nine months earlier her twin sister Hazel had collapsed at a track meet — a heart defect nobody had ever caught. Hazel was the loud one, the one who signed them both up for things. She called her sister “Marls.” She used to swear she’d never let Marlow miss a single night that mattered.

After the funeral, Marlow went silent. She skipped dinners, ignored her phone, and seemed convinced that moving forward meant leaving Hazel behind. That Saturday she shut her bedroom door and said she wasn’t going to homecoming, and please stop asking. The next morning our neighbor Beckett knocked. He was seventeen, quiet enough to disappear in a crowded room, and he asked me for