The not-knowing is its own particular horror, I’ve learned.

In the space of that one phone call I had gained a son and lost six months with him in the same breath — six months I could never get back, the first and most fragile stretch of his whole life, spent by me signing papers and pouring foundations while somewhere across town his mother lay awake wondering how the man who’d promised to love her forever could have gone so cold so fast.

I would spend the rest of my life making things up to both of them, and I already knew, sitting in that conference room, that some of it could never be made up, that there were nights of Rosalie’s I would simply never be able to give back to her.

A missing truth doesn’t just hide a fact.