I sometimes lost patience with it myself — the delays, the double-checking, the trips postponed over a cloud on the horizon.

I would think, just this once, can we not simply go.

I did not understand then what I understand now with a completeness that costs me sleep: that the carefulness was not anxiety.

It was love, expressed in the only grammar my husband fully trusted, the grammar of preparation, of leaving nothing to a chance he could have foreseen.

“They’re already in the side compartments,” Wyatt, my eldest, confirmed with the long-suffering sigh of a seventeen-year-old.

Lucas nodded slowly, gravely, as though he had just received official confirmation that the world was in order.