But it was not only logistics that occupied those two nights.

It was also a slow, clarifying grief.

I would sit with my son in the dark and feel my love for Nicolas — the real love, eight years of it — draining out of me hour by hour, and I did not fight the draining.

I let it go.

Because I understood that what I had loved was a man I had partly invented, a generous reading of someone who had been showing me his conditional heart for years in small ways I’d chosen to overlook.

The delivery room had only made the small ways large.