They just never once wondered what it actually cost to be there, or thought that the cost might be theirs to share.

Chapter 8 — The Bad Nights No One Saw

Here is what they did not know, because they were never there to know it.

They did not know about the bad nights — and near the end there were so many bad nights.

They did not hear her the way I heard her, calling out in her sleep for her husband, my father-in-law, the man dead these thirty years, saying his name into the dark in a young woman’s voice I had never heard her use awake, as though somewhere in her dreaming she had gone back to being the girl he married.

I would sit by her and hold her hand through it and not wake her, because whatever field she was walking in with him, it was kinder than the room she would wake to.