Nancy and I found ourselves unable to look at each other, or spend time with each other, without thinking of who was not there. She and I would sit to have dinner at our table and there would be this empty chair to my right, her left, where Linney had always sat. It would be so glaringly vacant that we found we couldn’t eat together. It became easier for me to work late, or dine with strangers, or alone, or in places Linney had never been. It became easier to talk with people who didn’t know I’d had a child. I could, for a little while, be part of the normal world, where one complained about salaries, or the price of steak, or the unreliability of the New York Central. For a little while . . . until I would compulsively mention something about Linney and make the stranger in my company woefully uncomfortable, and that would be the last I saw of them, for which we both were grateful.

But for Nancy and me to have tried to conceive a new child, perhaps hoping it would be a girl, maybe even hoping she would look and sound a little, or a lot, or exactly like Linney . . . it would have felt as if we were trying to replace our lost child. And that would have felt like we were the worst people on the face of the earth. Lose a child, make a new one, forget the old one, this one’s even better!

We could never have done that.

But if, when Linney died, we’d already had another child, one we would still have had to take care of, who would have been frightened about death and who would have needed to be reassured that the world was still secure and as safe as we could make it, perhaps that might have kept Nancy and me together. We could have done this for our other child. Linney would have wanted that, I was sure.

Now it seemed I’d had that second child all along. And I didn’t have to feel that I was betraying Linney, to whom I’d devoted most of my waking thoughts and all my troubled dreams. Gail had been conceived before I’d met Nancy, before I’d ever dreamt of having a daughter. If I’d neglected anyone all these years, it was Gail, the big sister Linney had never known. Who could say how much the two of them might have grown up alike, how much of the woman that Linney might have become would have been the way Gail was, this very minute, sitting near me in this small room, studiously reviewing the page of music I had orchestrated for her.