That was the deal, the unspoken deal at the center of every mother’s love, that I would go and she would stay, that she would stand at my grave someday, grown and whole, and not the other way around.

And instead I stood at hers with her son in my arms, and there is no word for that, and there never will be, and I have stopped waiting for one.

Chapter 3 — Just the Two of Us

They let me hold him, that first day, this tiny furious red-faced person who had cost me the most precious thing in my world, and I looked down at him and I understood, in a way that went underneath grief, that I was not going to be allowed to fall apart, because he needed me, and there was no one else.

So I did not fall apart.