It did not all become easy; life does not work that way, and there were still hard months ahead, still bills, still the ordinary grinding difficulty of a widow raising a son on one income.

But something fundamental had changed between us, something that made all the difficulty more bearable, which was that we now carried it together, out in the open, as a team of two rather than as two people each hiding their fear from the other in separate rooms.

Caleb told me things now.

When something worried him, he said so.

When money was tight and he noticed, he asked me about it instead of quietly resolving to fix it himself.

He learned, slowly, over the following year, how to be a child again, how to let his mother be the parent, how to set down the weight he had picked up at ten and leave it down.