I have wanted, in writing this, to be very careful about that moment, because it is the moment where a story like mine can go badly wrong, and I have read too many that do.

There is a version of this scene that is monstrous in its own quiet way — the version where the mother discovers her child is alive and feels only relief, pure and total and untroubled, where the dead boy is merely the happy twist that spares her own daughter, where his death exists in the story only to make the heroine’s fortune land more sweetly.

I have felt the pull of that version even in my own memory, because relief is a powerful and selfish emotion and it does not, on its own, make room for anyone else’s grief.

But I made myself hold the other thing too, in the very same breath, and I have never stopped making myself hold it.

A child was dead.

My relief did not lessen that by one degree; my daughter’s survival did not purchase itself with Bruno’s death, and to feel as though it had would be to accept a trade I was never offered and would never have made.