He had watched me grieve until I could not sleep, watched me go to a counselor, watched me slowly and painfully rebuild myself around a loss that was a fiction, and he had said nothing.

And then, when I had healed enough to love again, he had let me love him, had courted me under his brother’s name, and had married me.

That was the part I could not get past.

He had let me mourn him, and then he had seduced me with the mourning I did over the wrong grave.

That was what broke Teresa most completely, in the end.

It was not simply that she had lost a son; mothers, God help them, survive the losing of sons.