I showed up at the hospital to surprise my husband during his shift. But the second one of his coworkers saw me, all the color left his face. Then his eyes filled with tears. “He hasn’t said a word to you, has he?” Ben and I had been married eleven years, and for every one of those years, I had shared him with the hospital. He was a remarkably gifted surgeon.

“Brian is the most devoted, gifted pediatric surgeon I’ve ever stood next to in an operating room.”

That slippery bit of praise wasn’t an answer, and we both knew it deep down.

I got up from the chair without saying another word, walked past the silent nurses’ station, and rushed out through the glass doors into the bright sun.

Sitting in my car, my chest heaved with sobs I was holding back until a memory suddenly flashed into my head.

Years ago, when I was pregnant with Emma, Brian had put a family location-sharing app on our phones so we could always find each other in an emergency.