They had chosen the names three weeks before, privately, in the study, with the fire burning low and neither of us talking about anything else that needed to be discussed that evening.
Not announced. Not shared with anyone. Simply decided between the two of us, in the room that had become more fully ours with every month that passed, the names sitting quietly between us for three weeks until the morning they had somewhere to belong.
The first child: a girl.
Her name was Sera.
Not as a memorial. Not as the weight of an obligation or the performance of grief for a woman I had barely known in any form other than the shaped absence she had left behind her. As a continuation. A forward motion rather than a backward one. My mother had built the path, had cleared it deliberately and at enormo
