“Grandma,” he would ask, in the careful voice children use for the questions they sense are dangerous, “who was my dad?”

And every time, I would have to look into those hazel eyes, his mother’s eyes, and tell him the only thing I knew how to say, which was the truth, and which was also a kind of failure.

“I don’t know, sweetheart,” I would say.

“I’m so sorry.

I don’t know.” And it was true.

I did not know.

Chloe had taken the answer into her grave, or so I believed, and I had spent ten years genuinely, completely in the dark, telling my grandson the honest truth every time he asked, and hating that the honest truth was a locked door I could not open for him.

He took it well, mostly, the way children take the fixed features of their world, the way a child born without something learns to live in its shape.