When you were born, I imagined you belonged to my world. But this is an illusion to placate mothers. Motherhood is a temporary blossoming. Then we contract again. When you departed my life turned back into a hard little seed, not living this time but dead: the caraway in a cake to be spat out, unpalatable.

I might have escaped being discarded if I’d only continued contracting, into a smallness more infinitesimal than any seed—a point that intersects with pure zero and then continues into a different world. A world where mothers have no fear of being seed-small: they’ve moved beyond the smallest, most inconsequential nonexistence and have entered a space a man can’t know.

“You understand,” I told Sophie last September during one of these recitations, “my mother kept writing to me after she knew I was gone. She wrote two letters before word could reach her across the ocean—that happens to military families all the time. But this one I’m telling you about now….It was dated December 13, 1759, exactly three months after my death:

My Dearest,

I’ve had the mantua-girl on St. James Street make me a little visard to shade my eyes so I don’t have to suffer anyone noticing their puffiness. It’s embarrassing to cry in the park or in the shops and I never know when I’m going to do it. A fan is not concealing enough. The new visard allows me to walk outside without worrying over others’ pity.

This is worse than when you stopped holding my hand, all grown up, while mothers with smaller boys felt rapture as their sons clung with fond grabs, kisses and petulant complaints.

I wasn’t finished with you. You still live in my second, phantom memory, one in which you and I are younger, or sometimes older, than we are at this moment. I see you helping me choose the leather for the new shoes I’ll wear at your wedding, though I can’t envision the bride.

Your father never cared about buttery leather the colour of a cream-brown rosebud. You remember the shoe, don’t you, though we have not yet gone to choose it, and now we never will choose it outside our secret world. Your father and I never shared such a world.

You promised me you’d quit the army after Quebec. When your father died just after you sailed, I leapt, thrilled: his and the army’s claws would have to release you. Why did you not come back?

Remember walking past Mrs. Torrence’s garden twice one morning on purpose, to see her fat lilies ache open by noon? Or us, slow as caterpillars past Drake’s on the corner to watch the old baker roll knotted buns in time for our tea?