I temporarily reduced my travel schedule and arranged more consistent childcare with Samantha for the field-training periods that could not be moved.

Hannah continued her weekly counseling, and gradually stopped apologizing whenever she said Rebecca’s name aloud.

And together, we brought her mother’s framed photographs back into the living room, where they belonged.

We also built something, the two of us, over a few weekends: a memory cabinet, in the hallway.

It held Rebecca’s letters, our photo albums, her favorite cooking recipes on their index cards, and the keepsakes Hannah most wanted to be able to reach — not locked away, not hidden in a drawer, but present, accessible, part of the daily architecture of our home.

I was careful, and so was our counselor, that the cabinet not become the opposite error — a shrine, a monument to grief that trapped us in perpetual mourning.