She helped connect me with the people at the hospital who could discuss support, paperwork, and discharge planning.

She did not promise to solve what belonged to someone else.

That was the first time I described the situation without making Marcus’s absence sound temporary enough to excuse everything around it.

When I went home that night, I saw the brochure in the kitchen drawer.

I closed the drawer.

I had three daughters in the hospital.

A photograph of a balcony had stopped being something I could afford to think about.

PART 4 — The Signature I Had Never Written