“You just need to get better at the game.”

I set the tray down and wrapped an arm around each of them and pulled them in against me, and I closed my eyes for a moment and listened to the steady, strong, healthy rhythm of my two sons breathing.

After what I had heard in the dark of that box — the slow, failing, terrifying gasps of the two people I love most in the world — I do not think there will ever be a sound more beautiful to me than that one, the plain and ordinary sound of them simply, easily breathing.

I looked out across the vast blue water to where it met the sky.

We had been betrayed by the very people who were supposed to keep us safe.

We had been put in the cold ground and left there in the dark.

But watching my boys laugh under a clear autumn sky, I understood that the grave they dug for us would never be the thing that defined our lives.

Our story is defined, from here on, entirely by the light we found on the other side of the dark.