I have thought since about the strangeness of that moment — that on the night after I buried my child, the thing that pulled me back from the very edge of dissolution was not comfort, or hope, or love, but suspicion.

It seems almost unseemly, put that way.

A better woman, one might think, would have been too deep in her grief to notice a discrepancy in a deed, too consumed by loss to feel the cold prickle of a question.

But I have made my peace with it, because I have come to understand that the suspicion was not a betrayal of my grief.

It was, in its own strange way, an expression of it.

My son was gone, and there was nothing left in the world I could do for him — no illness left to fight, no bedside left to keep, no small warm hand left to hold.