And perhaps that was true.

But grief is not a problem to be solved on anyone else’s schedule, and the open doors were not madness; they were a kind of hope I was not ready to surrender, the hope every bereaved parent secretly nurses that the whole thing has been a terrible mistake and the children will walk back in and need their rooms exactly as they left them.

The doors stayed open for the children.

They would stay open, I eventually understood, for a different child entirely.