There is no comparison between the losses.

The others were betrayals, and betrayals, however deep, are wounds one person inflicts on another.

This was something else, a loss without a villain to blame, an emptiness where a whole future had been.

I do not have the words for it, and I will not reach for them.

I will only note, because it matters to what my daughter later did, one fact about the timing that I did not learn until much later, and that I have never fully made peace with: that while I was losing our child, Luca was away, with Chloe, on a trip.

He was not there.