The walls were bare except for a faint square where a movie poster had hung.

I remembered carrying him home from the hospital, holding him too tightly because I was afraid of losing him.

I had believed grief required a clean story: one baby lost, one baby saved.

The truth was messier and more cruel.

One child had grown up beside me.

The other had grown up five miles away, loved, safe, and unaware that his first mother had spent eighteen years mourning him.

I wondered whether a person could be grateful and furious about the same event.