That is the particular cruelty of losing someone before they know what they have made, and I have never found a way around it, only a way to live alongside it.

Julian never knew Grace existed.

He never held her, never heard her laugh, never saw the way she tilts her head when she is thinking or the stubborn set of her jaw when she has decided something.

Every milestone of her life has had a Julian-shaped absence beside it, a place where a father should have been standing and was not, and the grief of that is not a thing that heals so much as a thing you learn to carry without letting it crush you.

But I made a decision, early, about how I would carry it.