I had done it because his grief was real and he was a child and I could not bear to leave a child alone with grief.

I remembered a morning when he burned with a fever near a hundred and four, and Zachary was away for work, and I called Tristan’s mother, and she said she couldn’t come.

So I left Chloe, who was still a baby, with my neighbor, and I spent the whole night in the emergency room holding an eight-year-old boy’s hot little hand and telling him he was going to be fine.

I had done that.