It was never your job.

You are the brightest light in my whole world, and the sadness has nothing — nothing — to do with you.” That night the three of us sat on the living-room rug.

We didn’t paper over it with empty reassurance, and we didn’t lay a grown woman’s trauma on a nine-year-old.

We told him the truth, his size: that Mom’s job means fighting very hard to help people who are very sick, and that sometimes, no matter how hard she fights, she can’t save them, and that leaves a heavy, invisible weight she’d been trying to carry alone so it wouldn’t touch us.

Chapter 25 — We Can Be Sad Together

“It’s okay to be sad, Mom,” Colm said, with more grace than most adults ever manage.