What was left, when the hatred thinned out, was something quieter and more useful: a clear-eyed understanding of what had happened, and to whom, and why, and a determination to build the rest of my daughter’s life on ground that no one had poisoned.

I did not need to hate Julian to be free of him.

I only needed to stop defining myself and my daughter by the shape of the hole he had left, and to start, instead, simply filling the space with better things.

Grief, I have come to think, is not really filled by time.

It is filled by substitution — by the slow accumulation of new ordinary things in the space the old thing used to occupy, until one day you notice the space is full again and made of better material.

I did not wait to stop hurting before I began.