Harold had named her Margaret. That was his mother’s name. I didn’t know. I genuinely did not know that he had done this, and I’ve been trying to work out how I feel about that and I keep landing in different places depending on the day.

Some days I think it’s the most tender thing he ever did and the fact that he did it quietly and kept it for fifty years without making it about himself says everything about who he was. Other days I sit with the part where I didn’t know, where I was her mother and I didn’t know her name, and that one is harder.

We had two more children after Margaret. Renee, who is fifty now and lives in Portland. Paul, who is forty-seven and farms the back forty with his own son. Good lives. Full lives. Harold and I built something real and I’m proud of it and I know he was too. But none of that cancels out the three days in October of 1975. I think Harold understood that better than I let myself. I think he went to that cemetery and I don’t know what he did there, maybe just sat, maybe just stood, and I never asked and now I can’t.

Renee cried when I told her. Paul went very quiet, which is what Paul does. Neither of them said anything wrong, which I was grateful for. Renee asked if she could go with me the next time I visited and I said yes. I think I’d like that.

I’ve been back twice since that first Tuesday. I brought flowers the second time, nothing fancy, some zinnias from the garden that Margaret wouldn’t have known about but that felt like something she might have liked if she’d had the chance. I don’t know why I think that. I just do.

I’m not angry at Harold. I’ve thought about whether I should be, whether it was wrong that he kept this from me all those years. I’ve landed on: I think he was protecting me the way he knew how to protect, which was quietly and by himself. That was Harold. He carried things without making you feel the weight of them. It was a gift and also sometimes it wasn’t.

I put a photograph of the stone on the mantle, next to the one of Harold and me at Paul’s wedding. Renee thinks I should write something down, some kind of memorial, and maybe I will. I don’t know. Right now I just wanted to say her name somewhere that wasn’t just inside my own head.

Margaret.

She would have been forty-nine this October. I have no idea who she would have been. That’s the thing about losing someone before you know them. You don’t grieve the person, exactly. You grieve the whole shape of a life that never happened. Forty-nine years of birthdays and ordinary Tuesdays and maybe zinnias in a garden somewhere.