What came instead was a plain, level sadness, the kind you feel at the end of something that could have been good and was ruined by the one person who most needed it not to be.

I had loved him.

That was the part no one warns you about.

You can know to the marrow that a man planned to steal your child, and still stand at a window mourning the husband you’d imagined him to be, because that man had felt real for years, and grief doesn’t check your paperwork before it arrives.

Then Micah stirred on the monitor, a small sound in the next room, and the sadness folded itself up and put itself away, and I went to him.

There was always somewhere better to put my attention than Ivan.