But I am not at peace about Bruno, and I have decided I do not want to be.

There is a kind of grief that a decent person carries on purpose, because setting it down would mean forgetting, and some things it would be wrong to forget.

So I carry him.

Not heavily — not in a way that darkens my daughter’s sunlit mornings or shadows the life we built.

Just steadily, the way you carry the memory of anyone who mattered, a small permanent weight in a pocket over the heart.

My daughter is alive, and safe, and laughing on a lawn that no one can take from her, and that is very nearly everything.

And a little boy is not, and I remember him, and those two things sit together in me without argument, the way the truest things always do.

That is what peace turned out to be, for me.

Not the absence of grief.

The right grief, carried well, beside a great deal of joy.