PART 2
I didn’t scream.
I don’t know how I didn’t.
I stood at that window with my heart slamming, watching my husband of thirty-one years dig a hole in the dark and cradle a blanket-wrapped bundle against his chest, and my mind went to the worst places a mind can go.
Then I opened the back door and stepped out onto the cold grass, and Greg looked up at me, and his face — his face was not the face of a man doing something terrible.
It was the face of a man who had been carrying something alone for a very long time and had just been found out.
He was crying.
“Laura,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t want you to see this. I didn’t want you to have to carry it again.”
“Greg.” My voice shook. “What is that. What are you burying.”
He looked down at the bundle in his arms.
And very gently, he folded back a corner of Michael’s blue baby blanket.
Inside was not what my terrified mind had built.
It was a small wooden box.
Hand-carved. Old. The kind of thing you’d keep something precious in.
“It’s her box,” Greg said. “It’s Grace’s box.”
And the world tilted, because I knew that name, even though we had not said it out loud in almost thirty years.
Grace.
Our first baby.
The one we lost.
Before Michael. Before Emma. A daughter, born too soon, who lived for two days in a hospital and then didn’t, thirty years ago, when we were young and shattered and had no idea how to hold a grief that size.
We had never talked about her. Not really. We’d folded her away, the way people did back then, the way we were told was healthy — “you’re young, you’ll have more” — and we’d gone on and had Michael and Emma and a whole life, and we had never once, in thirty years, said her name at the dinner table.
I thought Greg had healed.
I thought I had.
I was wrong about both of us.
“Greg,” I breathed. “What is this. What’s happening to you.”
He sat back on his heels in the flower bed, holding the little box, and he finally told me.
