That I was grieving a client?

That an arrangement had ended?

The truth, that I had lost someone who had become as dear to me as family in the space of six months, had no words that would not have sounded absurd out loud.

So I grieved her in silence, in my small apartment, with a bag of chocolates and no one to explain it to, and I did not yet know that in three days a sealed envelope was going to tell me that the love I thought had been mine alone, and unrecognized, had in fact been seen and known and returned all along.

Three days after that private funeral, my phone rang, and it was the facility director, a woman I had spoken to only in passing on my way in and out.