The morning the Reeds’ baby dies was June 5: a day shimmering with light, the smell of lilacs hanging sweetly in the willow tree behind the house where Alyssa was hiding. From the tree, Alyssa could see the house where she lived, a yellow clapboard house with dark-green shutters, purple clematis climbing the front to the second-story window.

No one even knew or seemed to care that she was missing. Not her father, Jack Reed, who had arrived full of bad temper from the hospital in his old truck. Nor Daisy G., Alyssa’s grandmother — the dance champion of New Haven, Connecticut, in the “Seventy and Over” category — who was waiting for Alyssa’s father on the front porch with a cup of coffee. She put her arm around his shoulder and they walked in to the house, where the telephone was ringing.

Alyssa had watched her parents leave for the hospital in the middle of the night – leaning out the window of her bedroom as they got into the truck. Her mother, a belly huge with the new baby, was illuminated by the moon, bathed in silver light so her hair glittered and she seemed to float. That was the last Alyssa saw of her — an angel climbing into a pickup truck.

The next morning her father called from the hospital. “Give me Daisy G.,” he’d said, when Alyssa answered the phone.

They knew the baby was a girl. Already she had been given a name — Lila Rose.

“Lila Rose,” Alyssa would say, over and over. “This is Alyssa Reed and Lila Rose Reed,” people would say, as is the sisters were married.

After the phone call, Alyssa followed her grandmother into the kitchen — knowing already, the way a person does when something bad has happened.

“What’s up?” she asked.