That was what my son had already become to him, on the day of the funeral — not Leo, not our boy, not the light of both our lives, but everything that happened, a difficulty now safely behind him, an obstacle cleared from the path to his fresh start.

I did not scream.

I did not throw anything.

I looked, instead, at the small crayon drawing of a green dinosaur that Leo had taped to the front of the refrigerator two months earlier, with a piece of blue painter’s tape, and I turned, and I walked up the stairs.

Chapter 3 — His Room

I went to my son’s room.