In the quiet weeks after, Caleb and I would sit by the fireplace in the evenings and go slowly through the albums of photographs from our months with Arthur, and it was there, one night, that my son asked me a question I have never forgotten.

He had pulled out a small black-and-white picture of Arthur as a young man, dark-haired and unlined, standing straight and serious in a way that was still, somehow, unmistakably him.

Caleb studied it for a long time.

Over the months, gently and in pieces a child could hold, I had told him some of the truth, enough for him to understand that Arthur had done a great and generous thing for us, without laying on him the parts that were mine alone to carry.

“Mom,” he said softly, not looking up from the photograph.