It did not.

It left a quiet.

And into that quiet came all the ordinary things his presence had been crowding out: my son’s real laugh, my daughter’s questions, the letters I could finally answer, a whole family’s worth of people I got, at last, to actually know.

I do not lie awake thinking about Grayson in his rented apartment.

I think about him only the way you think about a long illness after you have recovered — with a kind of distant, sober wonder that you lived inside it as long as you did, and a quiet care about never going back.

He wanted, more than anything, to be the center of our lives, the sun the whole of our small world turned around.