The missing chapter from Boyt’s flawless novel Loved and Missed. I read most of this story through tears, I love these characters more than many real people. Read the book, I promise you’ll love it.

There was something about Lily going out into the world, a girl in a hoody with a basket in the forest, hem of her dress caught up in her fingertips, heart pried open so you could almost hear the pumping of her heroic (O positive!) blood type, urging her to receive life without judgement or grudges or speculation . . . Perhaps that was what was unbearable, the sense she would get mashed and pulped like all the other bright heroines, if Jean took her eye off her.