“For ten years, I believed exactly that.
But we don’t have time to be shattered right now, Lucien.
She has our daughter.
We put the feelings down, and we go get Elsie.
Right now.” And I pulled him up out of the chair by his jacket, because one of us had to be able to move, and it was going to have to be me.
I did not have room, in that moment, to feel much for what was happening to him — Elspeth was gone and every second mattered — but I have thought about it a great deal since, because in some ways his grief was the strangest casualty of the whole thing.