The wake was held at my mother-in-law Teresa’s house in the suburbs.

And from the moment we arrived, my daughter did something that I noticed, distantly, through my grief, without yet understanding its significance.

Chloe asked for a chair, so that she could sit close to her father’s face.

Teresa let her stay.

And several of the aunts whispered among themselves that the poor child was simply in severe shock, too young to process what had happened, clinging to her father because she could not yet let go.

But I knew my daughter, in the specific way that only a mother knows a child, and their reading of her was wrong.