She couldn’t have known how that propelled me back into my worst memory, how, instead of that lawyer’s office, I was suddenly back in my childhood home, sitting on the carpet, buttoning the dress of my favorite baby doll when the plate glass window shattered, when my older brother dragged me across the carpet, leaving rug burns on my thighs and glass embedded in my skin, to pull me away from the 1985 Porsche 944 that I had never been inside of, that my father polished and shined and waxed to perfection weekly. It took me years to understand how that Porsche had come through the window, to grasp that my father had been so drunk—a habit that I didn’t know then wasn’t an anomaly—that he had driven my mother through the house, into the room where we were all sitting.

It wasn’t until that day, sitting in the lawyer’s office, that it occurred to me that maybe none of it was an accident. Maybe my father meant to kill my mother; maybe he meant to kill all of us. I only saw him a few times after that, when my mother’s sister Mina, who I lived with, could gather the strength to take me, to face him. I was never brave enough to ask. I didn’t want to know the truth.

And as that naïve twenty-seven-year-old, I didn’t understand the ramifications of what Jeremy’s mother was saying, of how grateful I should have been to his father for calming her down. I didn’t even know how insurance money worked. All I knew was that, around that table, in the midst of all that pain, they offered me his million-dollar insurance policy if I’d walk away from the rest of his estate, including the house we shared. I remember thinking, They didn’t love him like I did. No one who loved him like I did could sit across a table from me and negotiate like that eleven days after he died, nine days after we placed an empty urn in the local church’s columbarium because his body was never found, buried under feet of snow and ice and fallen rock.

It was the loss that changed me. That steeled me. That nearly killed me. That shut me off for two more years until Glen with his soft-spoken love for me made me feel like I could breathe again. But it wasn’t the same. Not that I didn’t love Glen. I did. But once you lose your great love, all the others are tainted. You can’t help but be closed off from the world when you’ve lived through the worst that can happen to you.

And that was why, now, at midnight, I was awake, staring at the ceiling, wondering if I could really push past my fear to love Elliott the way that he deserved.