It is, I have come to think, the truest measure of how well a person loved: not the grand declarations, but the quiet accuracy of knowing what each person left behind will actually need, and making sure they have it.

Mark loved us that accurately.

And because he did, his mother and I, who might so easily have spent years as enemies over his grave, stood in a hallway instead and grieved him together, and were, from that day, not rivals for his memory but its two keepers.

Chapter 19 — Cecelia Born

Cecelia was born several weeks later.

She was healthy, and she was beautiful, and she carried the name her father had chosen for her on an ordinary afternoon before either of us knew what was coming.