My life is — I’m rebuilding everything.
But I don’t want to make a promise and disappear.
Mark asked me not to let Daniel be alone, and I think the least I can do is try to figure out what that means.”
Diane was quiet for a moment.
“He wrote you a good letter,” she said finally.
“He did.”
“He was a complicated person.”
“Yes.”
“So am I,” she said.
“So, probably, are you.”
“Almost certainly.”
She refilled my coffee without asking.
That felt like something.
In the living room, Daniel announced that the rocket was fixed and ready for launch.
We both turned to look.
He was holding it above his head with both hands, making a sound effect that was mostly just him saying *whoooosh* very seriously.
He had Mark’s eyes and his own everything else.
I pressed my hand to my stomach, where my daughter turned slowly, finding her position.
*I’m going to tell her about him,* I thought.
*When she’s old enough.
I’m going to tell her she had a brother she never got to meet.*
I didn’t say it out loud.
Josephine Ruth arrived three weeks later, at 4:47 in the morning, seven pounds and two ounces, with dark hair and a furious expression that made the midwife laugh.
I named her after my grandmother and Mark’s mother, in that order.
Ruth cried when I told her.
She was in the waiting room, and when the nurse brought her in she stood at the edge of the room with both hands pressed to her mouth and didn’t move for a long moment.
“Come meet her,” I said.
She came.
She held Josephine very carefully, like something she wasn’t sure she deserved.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly, to the baby or to me or to both of us.
“I should have told you.”
“I know.”
“I was trying to protect him.”
“I know that too.”
She looked up.
“Are you going to be able to forgive me?”
I thought about it honestly.
“I think so.
Not yet.
But I think so.”
She nodded and looked back down at Josephine, who had gone to sleep with the absolute confidence of someone who had no idea how complicated the world she’d arrived in was.
—
Diane sent flowers to the hospital.
A small arrangement, yellow and white, with a card that said: *Congratulations.
She’s lucky to have you.
— D and Daniel.*
I kept the card.
—
In the weeks that followed, I learned what it meant to be a person who had lost everything and was somehow still required to continue.
I fed Josephine at two in the morning and three in the morning and sometimes four-thirty, and in those quiet hours I talked to her in the dark — not about anything important, just whatever was in my head.
The way Mark used to hum when he was washing dishes.
The particular smell of the porch in summer.
The fact that he had once driven forty minutes in the wrong direction because he refused to admit the GPS was right, and they had laughed about it for years afterward.
I told her about Daniel.
“You have a brother,” I said one night, while she was eating and the rest of the world was asleep.
“He’s five, and he builds rockets, and he has your dad’s eyes.
You’ll meet him when you’re older.
I’ll make sure of it.”
She didn’t respond, because she was six days old and had other priorities.
But I said it out loud, and that made it real.
—
Ruth came three times a week.
