“No, honey.

None of this is your fault.

Not one single second of it.”

“I kept telling myself my stomach just hurt from stress,” Grace whispered, looking down at the white cotton blanket.

“Because whenever I brought it up five weeks ago, he told me I was faking the pain to get out of chores and ruin the family weekend.”

Quiet tears spilled over my lashes and down my cheeks, hot and sudden on my skin.

I wasn’t crying for Daniel, or for the seventeen years of marriage that had fallen apart in a courtroom at noon, or for the four-bedroom house on Elm Street we would never walk into again.