We have a story we tell about big families. The food. The chaos. The dancing. The eight aunts and uncles. The thirty cousins. The Sunday table that has barely had a free weekend in 40 years. We package it up and we say family is everything and we move on. But here's the part that's not in the highlight reel. You can grow up inside a family that big and still be lonely. You can know somebody's face and their last name and whose kid they belong to and still not actually know them. You can sit...

I've been thinking about a little girl at the top of a staircase. She's maybe four years old. She's holding a Father's Day gift she made in preschool — probably something with macaroni and construction paper, the kind of thing a kid makes with her whole heart. Her mom has just called her dad. He's agreed to come pick it up. He's standing right there at the bottom of the stairs. And she can't move. She doesn't walk down. She doesn't hand it to him. Her mom takes it the rest of the way. Later,...

I remember sitting across from Kortney—someone I’ve known since our college days—and feeling the air in the room shift. We weren't just two old friends catching up on the last twelve or thirteen years. We were stepping into the wreckage and the beauty of a story that most people are too terrified to even whisper about. "She will regret it for the rest of her life if she doesn't." That’s what a nurse whispered to Kortney’s husband while Kortney was in the middle of a waking nightmare,...