I sat straight up.
Michael was thirty and living overseas. Emma was twenty-eight and lived three states away.
Neither had children.
So who was Greg talking to downstairs?
I slipped out of bed.
I heard the deadbolt turn. Click. The back door opened, then closed.
I ran down barefoot.
The guest-room door was wide open. The rocking chair we’d used for both our babies was moving gently back and forth.
Then the porch light came on.
I pulled back the kitchen curtain… and went pale.
Greg was kneeling in the backyard in his pajamas.
With one arm, he clutched something wrapped in Michael’s blue baby blanket against his chest.
With the other, he was digging a small hole in the flower bed.
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.
