Even when I forgot. I had said it without quite deciding to, and it was truer than I meant to be with a seven-year-old.

There had been a stretch, in the worst of the grief, when I genuinely could not remember the man Ayana had married.

I could remember that he existed — could remember being brave, being whole, being someone who laughed the way she did — but I could not feel my way back to him.

He seemed like someone I had read about.

The version of me that survived those two years was a smaller, grayer thing, built for endurance and nothing else: get Nia to school, get through work, get through the night, do it again.

That man did not have room for the medal in the drawer or the sergeant in the story or the young husband on the beach.