“Grace, she never stopped hoping for that too.”

“Don’t.”

He went silent.

I turned to face him.

Kenneth had always been the man who remembered forms, insurance cards, the exact hour a medication was due.

In the first years after we married, I had loved his steadiness.

When Hannah became ill, that steadiness sometimes looked to me like a failure to feel enough.

Now his cheeks were wet, and he wasn’t wiping them.