My husband had spent years warning me never to set foot on that farm. So after he passed away and the lawyer handed me the key, saying that from now on the place belonged to me, I was ready to sell it right away and put everything behind me. But before making my final decision, I still wanted to see it once for myself. When the door opened, I finally understood why, all those years, he had never wanted me to set foot there.

That was the thing about loving someone for a long time. You stop needing explanations for every wound they carry. You learn which doors are locked for a reason. You let certain rooms in their past stay dark because marriage, if it lasts, is not built only on confession. Sometimes it is built on respect. Sometimes on restraint. Sometimes on looking at the person beside you and deciding that whatever they cannot yet say is not proof they do not love you.

So I never asked too hard about his childhood in Alberta. I never pushed when he would mention horses, or winter, or a river behind a farmhouse, and then go quiet. I never insisted when his jaw tightened at the mention of his brothers. I told myself everyone came from somewhere complicated. I told myself we had built a good life in Minnesota, and maybe that mattered more than the place he had escaped.

Then Joshua died on an ordinary Tuesday in late September.