I think about the open doors sometimes, the two bedrooms I could not empty for three years, and I understand now that I had the whole thing backwards.

I had kept those doors open out of grief, as a kind of waiting, as if by refusing to close them I could hold a place for children who were never coming back.

And all that time the waiting was real but the object of it was wrong.

I was not holding those rooms for Ivy and Aaron, who were gone and at peace.

I was holding them, without knowing it, for a boy by a window and a little girl with a worn stuffed rabbit — for the two children who would one day fill my silent house with noise again, and teach a grieving woman that a heart is not a monument to what it has lost but a room that keeps making space for what it still has left to love.