She had simply, somewhere in the accumulated weeks of afternoons and Saturdays and ordinary showing-up, come to feel it, so deeply and so naturally that the word arrived without her permission, the way you call a thing by its true name without thinking.

That was the proof Leo had demanded, delivered not by Alex but by the slow work of time, made visible in a single syllable from his other child.

He had not earned the word by asking for it.

He had earned it by making it true.

And when it came, it came the only way that counted: on its own, when he had stopped trying to make it come at all.

Chapter 20 — Choosing to Stay