“The loss of him felt cumulative, as if he’d been slipping away so slowly that she’d missed the rift as it formed in his childhood. It was only once he’d become a man that she realized she couldn’t reach him anymore, that he was gone, so gone that breath had left his body. No one else could feel that lifetime of loss. No one else had lost him more than she had, yet they cried in front of her as if it meant something.”
