Now the memory of those small kindnesses made his absence seem even less understandable.

Hannah opened a nursery photograph on her phone.

“We put the crib against the green wall because the morning sunlight comes in from the east.

Lucas tested the monitor four times.

He insisted on assembling the dresser himself, even though he put one drawer in backward.”

She began to cry again, but this time it was the quiet kind of crying that leaves a person exhausted rather than relieved.

“I don’t understand who that man was in the delivery room,” she said.