In the city, at the end, I’d learned that my grief made people uncomfortable, that there was a socially acceptable duration for widowhood after which you were meant to be recovered, and I’d taken my grief underground rather than watch one more face rearrange itself into patience when I said her name.

So it had lived in me, unspoken, for four years, and unspoken grief does a particular damage: it convinces you that the person is being forgotten, erased, that by keeping quiet about them you are letting them disappear a second time.

Saying Carol’s name aloud to Del, under that truck, was the first time in four years I’d felt her be real to anyone but me.

He didn’t need her to be over.

He didn’t check his watch on my sorrow.

He just received it, the way you receive a fact, and in receiving it he gave me back the freedom to have loved her, to go on loving her, out loud, in the present tense, without apology.