The tragedy—and the entire point—of being a parent was the moment when the story stopped being about you. It was prefigured and foreshadowed in the tear-jerking moments that parents captured in snapshots, and that advertisers looted for use in commercials: baby’s first steps, day one at kindergarten, riding a bicycle, soloing behind the wheel of a car. Zula and Csongor had been through all of those with Sophia, and had taken pictures and shed tears like everyone else. But the one that had really struck home had been when Sophia had gone off to college and blithely not communicated with them at all for three weeks. No text messages, no tweets, no phone calls: just a silence that might as well have been that of the grave. It wasn’t that she didn’t remember and love the family she had left behind. What she was doing at college was so fascinating that it simply didn’t occur to her to phone home. Csongor had suffered it in silence. Zula had reached out to her fellow bereaved: the mothers of Sophia’s school friends and soccer teammates. Some of them were still hearing from their kids several times a day, and tracking them on social media, but others were feeling what Zula felt: the sense of having been left behind, as if you were a character in a movie who gets run over by a bus at the end of the first reel, clearing the way for a younger, more charismatic star to act out the main story.

Losing your child was the opposite of that. A perverse twist in the story, where the wrong person gets hit by that bus, leaving behind, alone on the stage, survivors who never expected and never wanted to be in the spotlight. It wasn’t the worst thing about losing your child, of course, but it was a part of the dismal picture.

A decade and a half after Sophia’s death, the tears still came to Zula at the strangest moments. In many ways, the consequences to her and Csongor, and to their relationship, had been typical. They had gone for a week, then a month, then a year without having sex. Csongor had moved out of the condo, unable to bear its associations with the daughter they’d raised there, and Zula had become almost a recluse inside of it. After two years they had gone through the formality of a divorce. They didn’t hate each other. They didn’t not love each other. But the entire basis of the marriage seemed to have been erased.