BACK IN FOURTH GRADE, THERE was a long stretch of time when I had the same boring dream every night. In the dream, I sat in the living room with Anna, Mom, and Dad, and we were all reading books and eating apples. That was all there was to it. The only thing that changed was the color of the apples. Sometimes they were red, other times a yellowish green.

Anna still slept in the top bunk back then, and every morning she’d ask what I’d dreamed about. I’d tell her that it was the same dream as before. Then I’d ask what she’d dreamed about, and she’d tell me how her dreams had been filled with strange elongated animals, multicolored icebergs, and other surreal things. And I was jealous. Jealous of how she had the interesting dreams while I was stuck on this same dull dream of our family hanging out together in the living room doing absolutely nothing special.

Now I wanted that dream back. Needed it back. To know that when I went to sleep, I would return to that place. To the security, the normalcy of that moment. Of the luxury of not paying attention to each other, knowing that at any moment I could look up and see Anna there. That I’d look at her and feel like she was someone I still knew.

Because I had messed it all up. I had learned nothing from Mr. Matthews. Nothing about Anna, nothing about that night, nothing about how he’d felt about her. I wanted to bang my head against a wall, kick a tree—anything that made me feel something other than this ever-expanding hole of regret.

I’d spent so long trying to understand what had happened, and now I’d looked back at the wrong moment, looked back and lost what I’d been searching for all along. Mr. Matthews was never going to say anything to me, was always going to be on his guard around me. I’d lost the last fragments of Anna left for me to find.