“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I’m so sorry, sweetheart.” And they wept together in the dim light.

He was grieving two people in that room, and it took him a moment to separate them.

He was holding his daughter, alive, found — and he was also, at the very same instant, losing his wife again, differently and worse, because the manner of Quenby’s death had just been rewritten in front of him.

For six years he had told himself a bearable story: that Quenby had died of grief, that her heart had broken because their daughter was gone, that it was a natural tragedy, terrible but no one’s fault.

He had made a kind of peace with it.