Seeley Swan Pathfinder -

When I was seven years old, my great-grandmother died.

I had been told that she was dying, so it wasn’t a sudden event and as my mother sat deeply into her squatting legs in the twilight morning and woke me so many hours before school, I knew what she was going to say.

“Grandma Virginia is dead.”

I rolled over and cried. I cried for the woman who taught me to crochet; for the frail woman in long dresses whom I remembered from summers in Oklahoma.

I cried because I felt that I was supposed to.

But the truth about Virginia Tally is more complicated than simply that she died. Before that...