It was my grief, finally given something to do.

My love for Leo could not save Leo.

But it could, it turned out, save the house he had grown up in, and my own life along with it, and it reached for that with all the desperate force it had been unable to spend on saving him.

The dead cannot be protected.

But their memory can, and their homes can, and the living mother left behind can.

And a mother’s love, denied the child, will pour itself into protecting whatever of the child remains — and in my case, what remained was a house, and a memory, and a small green dinosaur, and I would burn the world down before I let anyone take those too.