Our home still smelled like his coffee.
His running shoes were still beside the garage door.
His favorite navy sweatshirt still hung over the chair in our bedroom because I had not found the courage to move it.
Eventually, my mother stopped saying, “You need a change of scenery,” and started saying, “Meredith, you do not have to carry every ordinary day by yourself.”
That was the sentence that finally convinced me.
My daughter Hadley was eight years old. She had Gavin’s gray-blue eyes, his habit of noticing everything, and an uncomfortable talent for asking exactly the question adults hoped she would not ask.
Our son, Theo, was only five months old.
He would never remember his father holding him against his chest at two in the morning.
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