“Do I get to know?”

“No,” we said, at the same time.

I spent a long time believing that my life was a list of things that had been taken out of it.

A daughter.

The possibility of another one.

A marriage.

A house I picked the tile for.

What I have come to think, four years on, in a small house with a courtyard the size of a rug, is that the losses did not leave the space empty.

They cleared out something that had been occupying it — nine years of a story about myself that I did not write and never once checked, told to me by a woman who needed somebody to be responsible for her grief.

And what grew in the space afterward is not a consolation prize.

It is a life in which nobody has to be excluded from the seating plan.