Excerpt from The Half-Life of Everything by Deborah Carol Gang, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Dylan was away at college by then, so Jack and David and whichever twin was on duty would do their best, but every few weeks they'd find that Kate had disappeared. Or worse, they'd get a call before they noticed she was missing. One moment he was watching her nap in their room, and the next she was at Starbucks, and not the close one - the one you walk through traffic to get to.

David guessed that some of their friends thought stepping in front of a car would be a kind and even natural way for things to end. Maybe he was the one who thought it. He wondered if he would then feel free and relieved. Sometimes he'd glimpse her absence for a moment, but right behind the freedom was a sadness so bleak, so lonely and frightening, that he could never see past it. Then the time came to look for an "assisted-living " place for Kate. He liked the name - no jargon, truthful. He had expected to be caught between a barrage of "how can you do this to her?" and "we thought you should have done it long ago." But it turned out that no one outside the family really cared. People have a sadness quotient. They had tired of the drama and the pain and she didn't really exist for them anymore.

Kate had one friend, their neighbor Martha, who stayed in contact, helped her buy new clothes and visited regularly. Kate and Martha would look through old photo albums together or Martha would make cookies and give Kate easy assignments so she could help. Kate seemed to enjoy it and to feel safe around her. David and Martha rarely talked or spent time with one another. They had barely mastered the skill of not crying around the other. He was worried that he was seen, not by Martha but by others, as a pathetic figure, a man determinedly married to a woman who wasn't there - like the Japanese boys and their pillow girlfriends.

* **

The incident they couldn't ignore happened when Theresa and Jack were home and each thought the other was with Kate. David was the one to track her down after frantic multiple phone calls from both Jack and Theresa. He found her farther from home than any previous ramble had taken her, sitting on a bench in a tiny triangular park at the intersection of three streets. Shivering a little, she said, "You're so late, David. I thought you had forgotten me."

That night Jack came to him. "I know you've been waiting for me to admit that we can't take care of her anymore. We don't even know if Dylan's coming back after college, and I'm supposed to leave in the fall. Dylan's kind of useless anyway - he mostly goes to his room and cries."

It was true that Dylan, no longer hardened against the grief, would cry during his visits home. And crying upset Kate. She'd try to comfort whoever was sad, and if it didn't work, she'd cry too - or get agitated. To avoid such outward displays of sadness, David and the boys used the Lamaze breathing she had taught them for undergoing dental work, or they would look towards the ceiling - a suggestion one of them heard on NPR. If things were really tense, one of them would say, "Well, you can't have everything." No one remembered who had said this first, but the mildly dark humor proved to be a reliable weapon.

"Dad, please let's wait until I leave for college. It's less than four months. Sports will be over soon, and I'll help more."

David stared at this boy, who until recently wouldn't shut the microwave door after removing food, who had to be reminded ten times to write a thank-you note, and who left cereal bowls with aging milk for others to find and dispose of. Jack had been adult-sized for several years - he hardly recalled Jack even going through puberty. The kid had just morphed without awkwardness. He and his brother had Kate's complexion, the kind that tanned easily and made you expect brown, not blond hair with pleasing stripes of darker blond. They used to tease David that he was a different species, the only one with dark hair and curls that emerged if he skipped a single haircut. He had skipped many haircuts at Kate's request.

Excerpted from The Half-Life of Everything by Deborah Carol Gang . Copyright © 2018 by Deborah Carol Gang . Excerpted by permission of Bancroft Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.