There is no arrangement, no amount of Saturdays, and no quantity of remorse that recovers them, and one of the more useful things Dr.

Achebe ever said to me was that I should stop trying to and start grieving them properly, as losses, the way you would grieve anything else.

Jessi did all of it alone.

She was thirty-four and pregnant and newly divorced and she had given away a house, and she went back to her own name and raised a boy on a regional manager’s salary in a rented single-story on Chestnut Street, and she did not have one person to hand him to at two in the morning for four years.

When people call her generous for opening that door on Christmas Eve, they are usually not thinking about the seven years that made the generosity necessary.