It was a salve to keep North alive in these moments. You cherished the pleasant, ordinary interactions you had with strangers who fully believed you were just another mother muddling through. It was the only thing that kept you going. Graham was already checked out—he was done with you just months after North died, unable to live with your coping mechanism, and it was only a matter of time until you would find those affair emails on his computer. And once that happened, once you headed off to Raisin Beach, you couldn’t go alone. So you brought North with you.

North grew from a toddler to a young child. You cuddled with him in bed. You played dump trucks with him on the carpet. It strikes you what this must have looked like to outsiders, had they been looking in on you: a woman playing alone on the floor, talking to thin air. Though, to be fair, you aren’t sure anymore if you actually played or if it all took place inside your brain. The strangeness of what you were doing didn’t even seem so strange anymore. It had become a habit, a crutch, maybe even a second personality. You couldn’t just excise North. You couldn’t just ditch him. And when you went for the position at Glory Be and blurted out North’s name in one of your first speeches, making him part of your narrative . . . well. You were in it for the long haul. You wanted to be a single mother of an eight-year-old, not a grieving mother of a child who’d died when he was a baby for reasons that were possibly your fault.

And so, on you went.

“Ms. Jovan, we’ve been informed about your child,” Jean from Hulu had said on the phone the day before. “And first of all, I’m very sorry for your loss.”

He’d paused for a long time, then, as though checking your level of sanity. Did you even know that your child was gone? You did, intellectually. But what most shocked you was that after all these years, someone else knew. Your neighbors, your co-workers, parents at the school—no one had ever asked point-blank. Oh, sure, they’d wondered where North was, but you always had an excuse. How lonely that had been! How removed your life was from anyone else’s.

“I’m not equipped to help you with what you’re going through, though I do think you are going through something,” Jean went on. “But I think . . . I think that perhaps we should step away from focusing on your school and let you sort all that out internally.”