One road is bitterness — the slow closing of a door, the retreat into a cottage, the becoming of a neighborhood ghost.

Arthur walked partway down that road; I met him on it.

But the other road, the one he found again the night he heard my husband bragging on a porch, is stranger and harder and much rarer.

It is to take the shape of your own unhealable loss and turn it outward, into a shield for someone else.

He could not save the family he had lost.

So he decided, that night, to protect a family that did not yet exist — mine, and the two heartbeats that were not even heartbeats yet, that were only a possibility a cruel man was trying to forge out of existence.