Daniel held the frame for a long moment.
Then he looked around the table at the three children who had chosen one another when the adults around them failed.
“She’s right,” he said.
Lily smiled, climbed onto his lap, and helped him blow out the candles.
No one was sent away.
No chair was reserved by blood.
And for the first time in generations, the Whitman name meant exactly what Daniel’s grandmother had hoped it would mean: not a locked door, but an open one.
