“Callum, it was real the first night you cried beside our bed.

PART 5

In the weeks that followed, I reconstructed the year as though I were arranging fragments of a broken photograph.

His missed birthday wasn’t an emergency surgery.

It was an MRI that had run late, followed by an appointment he couldn’t face discussing.

Thanksgiving had coincided with a particularly painful episode when he was afraid to drive, and he had spent the afternoon asleep in an on-call room.

Some of the excuses covered real surgeries, and some covered fear.