I understand now that this was wrong, or at least incomplete.

A child does not need to be protected from his own mother.

He needs her woven into the fabric of his days, present at his baseball games and his birthdays and his Sunday pancakes, not as a tragedy but as a love that surrounds him still.

Chloe fought with everything she had to bring Noah into the world.

The least I can do, the truest way I can honor what she did, is to make sure that the boy she died for grows up knowing, in his bones, every single day, that he was wanted that much, and that his mother is not gone from him but simply watching, from a little further away than the other mothers, but no less closely, and no less proud.” He had read her letter, by then, the parts of it a boy his age could hold, the parts where his mother told him how much she had loved him and how hard she had fought to bring him safely into the world, and he did not ask me anymore about the man who had been on the news.

He looked up at me, his hazel eyes, his mother’s eyes, clear and calm and at peace, without the old shadow in them, without the ache that used to come into his face whenever the subject of his father drifted near.