I shook my head with realization. “Oh, Katie.”

I touched my sternum, tried to comfort my plucky, bruised heart, so worn out from this last week of jump and run, and beat, beat, beat. If only sleep would barge in and take over. Where was my get-out-of-life-free card?

People always said their heart was where they felt all emotions. But the heart was a survival organ and didn’t have time for every quiver and quake. As strong and fearful, as complicated and sad as I felt in that moment, I realized that life was a cluster of love, fear, loss, and acceptance scattered between the heartbeats. That was what true survival was, keeping the heart beating while continuing to feel everything.

“Oh, Katie,” I said again, instead of my usual No! of denial. I stood and crouched by Katie’s side, my hands on her slight knees covered in a thick cotton blanket.

“I thought you said this would work,” I whispered.

Holly placed her hand on my shoulder, her fingers finding the small hairs on my neck. She joined me on my knees, put her arm around me, touched her forehead to my temple the way she did all those years ago. During late nights studying, after boy drama, that one time they thought I had meningitis, but I’d just had a weird reaction to the flu shot. All those years, and her forehead felt just the same.

“You guys.” The triplet emotions of pleasure, despair, and love competed in a kind of foot race through my nervous system. Katie dropped her hand on my head, like a priest or a kindly old lady who had lived ninety-seven years and had seen every single thing there was to see in life. Had the perspective of the ages and wanted to pass it on.

I was a child, now crying at her mother’s knee, and through all of it, all I could do was mutter, “I thought you said this would work.” I drew in a shuddering breath and clutched at my new, shaky acquaintance, courage, and met Katie’s eyes.

And, like it was no big thing, like it wasn’t one of the biggest things in my life, she flicked her gaze to Holly and back to me and said, “Oh, Samantha. It did.”