And still I could not stop, because stopping felt like agreeing to a version of my husband that was not him, and I would rather carry an open wound than close it over a lie.

In the end that refusal was not stubbornness or sickness.

It was loyalty, the deepest kind, the kind that keeps asking a question on behalf of someone who can no longer ask it themselves.

Chapter 9 — Zachary

Lucas’s younger brother, Zachary, tried his best to hold us up in those years, and I want that remembered, because of everything that came later.

He was at our house constantly in the aftermath.