I could not argue Leo back into believing in fathers, or pilots, or the sky.

What I could do was be, every single day, the one adult who was reliably, boringly, completely there — who never once, in three years, said she would be somewhere and was not, who never made a promise she did not keep, who built her son’s whole world on the radical foundation of a grown-up who could be counted on.

And that, it turned out, was enough.

Not because it replaced his father, but because it gave him a floor — one solid, trustworthy surface in a world that had dropped out from under him — and from a solid floor, a child can eventually reach back up toward the sky.