There is no performance of grief that produces those sounds, that particular bone-deep unraveling of a person confronting the end of the world.

Whatever had brought Gabriel and Gemma together, and I still did not know the half of it then, what existed between them now, five years and two babies later, was the realest love I had ever been in the presence of.

I knew it before I knew anything else that night.

The love was real.

Everything else was still a mystery, but the love was beyond question, written plainly on the face of a man falling apart at one in the morning.

Whatever else I did not understand about Gabriel that night, and it turned out to be a great deal, I understood that.