Now I know that, when you lose a child, it’s not the same as losing a contemporary, even a beloved husband or wife. When you lose a child, you grieve as a child grieves, which is to say, you grieve backward. You don’t get better as time passes, you get worse. Time does not take you closer to acceptance, only further from the one you love. Day by day, Belinda slipped away from Jill. Season by season, the clothes in Belinda’s closet were no longer the current style; the music on her player was not the music other kids listened to anymore. Year by year, other people’s daughters and sons, once the same age as Belinda, grew up; and they did the things that Belinda would have done: They graduated college and started medical school or graduate school. They joined the Peace Corps. They backpacked across Europe. They found their first jobs. They learned to sign contracts and leases and health-insurance forms. Some of them got engaged. The more of those milestones that passed, the more meaningless the world became. Jill did not get stronger, she only got older—older without Belinda. The very good memories—silly small things, the way Belinda cried when a dog died in a movie, the gleam of sunscreen on her small shoulder when she was a child at the beach, the color of the Christmas wrapping paper she stamped by hand, the way Belinda hummed as she made her oatmeal, the way she wrapped her long hair in an old tee shirt to dry...these began to lose their sharp edges. The sound of a laugh that was like Belinda’s, the sudden burst of a song Belinda loved when Jill turned on her car radio, the smell of freesia, a scrawl of words on an old grocery list in the bottom of a drawer, BUY STRAWBERRIES, all these had to be wrenched out of her mind and compacted like trash until they were no longer familiar or even recognizable. Those very good memories once scalded Jill like zinc in her eyes; but she realized that the scalding was better, much better, because at least it was feeling and feeling had washed off her like sidewalk chalk in the rain. The scalding grief was better because it was the dark twin of the stupefying love you felt for your child when you had your child with you, a passion so much bigger than anything you expected to feel, so much bigger than any other parent’s love, so magnificent you had to keep it secret, lest the bored gods notice and knock it out of your hands. Jill’s love for her only was a second sun. And as the sun disappeared, minute by hour by day by week by month by year, so did her reason. She would have been the last person to be aware of the awfulness of her crime. To the end, she would have considered Stefan responsible for Belinda’s death, as he does, and now, as I do, in a sense, as well.