All these girls. If they saw the wreckage inside him they’d run.

Her mother wears it in her eyes: the grief, the regrets, the guilt. She has the body of a twenty-year-old. Eyes like she’s fifty. Dark purple circles. Wrinkle wings along the edges. This woman who used to fill her mind with princess stories, castles and dragons and magic rings that transported Lyric to other worlds. But there are no castles on the southeast side. And the only princesses in Grand Rapids are white and Dutch and oblivious to this life.

Isaac gives his grief to the concrete. It makes sense. But Jackson can’t help but wonder: what happens when the concrete is gone? What happens when the grief digs itself out of the darkness?

The little girl who loved her father more than anything in the world is gone. Who survived has survived wolves.

It’s like she’s floating inside of herself, in the dark, and whatever hasn’t already emptied inside her is emptying now...