When you were little, your first memory is your brother. David is wide-faced and smiling and happy and everything you've never been. In this memory, you're holding David. "Don't worry," you tell him. "I'll take care of you."

You have so few memories of him. Every day, you hold them closer. Every day, you feel them slipping away. David, swinging his chubby legs on the swing, determined to be as big and strong as his sister. (You'd go up behind him and push by just the chain, so he didn't know you were doing it.) David, smiling. David, taking his first steps. (There are a few other 'first's in there - like the first time you set him on a tricycle and wheeled him around the close. You try not to remember that one.)

After David, it's all a blur. The Sullivans. The Morris'. The Greens. House, after house, face after face.

(It's not your fault, you tell yourself after all these years. You can't tell if you believe it.)

You're pretty sure something in you broke, after David. You feel too much, for a little while - and then you don't feel anything for a long time. Until one more. Until maybe two.

You will grow to love them. You will tell Alec I need you, you will ask Eliot does that make us bad? But for now you wake up to sunshine and their shouting, and you fall asleep to David.

You get better. Day after day, job after job. You discover that some people will laugh both at you and with you; will accept you as you are; will not run away, even when you nearly decapitate them with an elevator. (Some will even stand with you under a blanket of stars and whisper, I like the way you turned out.)

When the psychic brings up David, in front of Nate and the team and the entire world, you think the ground will shatter under you. Or maybe you're the one who will shatter - every atom falling into nothingness. You run, and you run, and you run; back to the only place you've been able to call "home".

"How do you do it?" You will ask Sophie later, sitting on a balcony surrounded by sunshine and suffocation. "How do you care?"

But for now, you breathe in the silence, and you cry.

They never ask about David, and you never tell them. Some things need to stay secret, even though you're finding out that more and more of these things can be shared, if you choose the right people. But David stays with you, and every night you hold Alec's hand and you forget a little more.

He will find a picture during one of his scans, three years after the team subtracts two and you try to unlearn everything you've spent the last five years learning. It'll be you, holding David in your arms, him squirming with laughter as your fingers brush his armpits. He won't say anything, but when you wake up the next morning it'll be sitting in a frame next to your bed. You'll pick it up and hold it to your chest, and this time the tears will be only from remembering.

You think you might be able to forgive yourself. In two years you will let yourself love again, in five you will say your I dos. In ten, you'll go back to visit his grave, and in twelve you will find yourself with another headstone to cry on. In twenty, you will bring someone else into your family - Jame, a foster-kid-turned-car-thief. You will never understand teenage girls, but you will start to love the word Mom.

You will learn, after Jamie and her wife adopt triplets, that a heart can grow. A heart that thought it would never feel again can experience boundless amounts of love at a voice calling Grandma.

In sixty years, you will be beside a hospital bed, leaning over to kiss him one last time. In sixty-one, you will be the one in the bed. You will close your eyes, and you will see them. You will see David.

You think you might be able to forgive yourself.

You think maybe he never blamed you in the first place.