you okay?” he asked.
I leaned into him.
The answer was not simple. I was not healed. I was not untouched by envy or anger or the particular grief that returned without warning in grocery aisles, in lullabies, in the sudden sweetness of baby shampoo from a stranger’s coat.
But I was no longer trapped in the room my mother had named for me.
“I’m here,” I said.
Thomas kissed my temple. “Yes, you are.”
Above us, in the apartment, Lena’s blanket rested in its cedar box. In the window, the new yellow blanket held the spring light. Outside, the city moved on, not because my daughter had not mattered, but because she had. Because love did not end simply because a life was brief. Because memory could be a wound and still become a place to stand.
That evening, before closing, I turned the sign in the door and stood for a moment in the quiet shop.
Rain began again, soft against the glass.
The bell above the door trembled once in the draft.
I looked at the cradle in the window, at the folded yellow blanket glowing gently beneath the streetlight, and for the first time in nine months, I did not feel like I was leaving my daughter behind by taking a step forward.
I whispered her name into the empty shop.
Then I turned off the lights and went upstairs to my husband.
