Two things were true on that stranger’s floor, and I refused to let either one crowd out the other: that my daughter was alive, and that a little boy was not, and that both of those facts deserved the whole of my heart at once.

A mother who can only feel her own child’s rescue, and has nothing left over for the child who was not rescued, has been made smaller by her own good fortune.

I would not be made smaller.

I held my living daughter as tightly as I have ever held anything, and I wept for her survival, and in the same tears I wept for Bruno, and I have come to believe that the second weeping is the only thing that kept the first one from being a kind of sin.

Chapter 16 — Bruno’s Name

I want to stop the story here, for one chapter, and speak about Bruno, because the world had already tried once to erase him, and I will not be part of doing it again.