Inside the frame was my own face. It was my junior-year portrait set against black velvet, with a small brass plate beneath it giving my name and the year I came home from the hospital as the year I was lost. Tucked into the corner was a plant tag in my handwriting. Graft is good. Water deep the first summer. She’ll bloom. Brooke had planted that dogwood in a memorial garden for me, never knowing she had bought it from me. Every rule finally lined up: the candle, the missing name in the obituary, the lock, the prayer. My parents had let the Whitfields believe I was dead, because it was easier than saying the word hospital out loud.

I did not wake anyone. I sat at the dining-room table and opened the yellow notebook, seven years of tally marks, dates, and texts. In the morning, my father found me there with coffee I had made myself. My mother stopped in the doorway, arms crossed, the way she always did. “Joni,” she said, and her voice broke on my name. I told her I had not come to shout. Brown means dead, I said, and green means living, and I had been living the whole time, just not where they could see me.