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To live for your children seems a normal thing, a respectable one; to live because of your children is something else. Mine are the blood of me, and the oxygen in that blood, the airflow and the neurons firing and the stretch and release of muscles in limbs, they are the foundations that make up my skeleton, all the collagen and calcium upon which I stand and fall, and the pulse and the flow and the beat. But I think maybe this is too much for them to be. The breath of a man. The life of him. I think it is too heavy a thing for children to carry.

We dance on the hill and I watch them, and I think that I have been holding them hostage. So we will leave this place and I will let them go, I will let them become. Not Orly yet, but one day. And for the first time I realize that this will not lessen the profundity or fervency of how I love them. It will not mean I stop protecting them, would not lay down my life for them, will not be there every second that they need me. It just means that I can’t let them worry about me anymore. Whatever that takes.

I look at the woman who has made all of this clear to me. Who has given us this gift. She is so beautiful in the glow of the rising sun, as she tilts her head back to laugh with my children. How did I not see this beauty the first moment I set eyes on her?

Later, we huddle in front of the fireplace to get warm. Rowan rises for bed before the rest of us. I take her hand, wanting to stay her, but she looks at me and tells me to enjoy the moment with my kids, and I know what all of this has been about. She has done this for us.

When it is just me and my children, Fen moves to sit beside me. I feel no hurt or betrayal—all of that has trickled out of me. Instead all I see now is how terrible it must have been for her, to do such a thing, to think she had to do it, for me. I reach out and run my hand over her short spiky hair. In her eyes is a question.

“Impossible to tell from the seals now,” I say, and she smiles.

Fen takes something out of her pocket. “I saved these.”

In her hand are Claire’s three wedding rings. The first engagement band I saved up for in our early twenties, the wedding band, and the ring I got her on our tenth anniversary, not long before she died. An immense wave of emotion rises up in me at the sight of them. Something like love and loss and pain and relief. For a second the desire to take them and close my palm around them is so strong I can hardly breathe. But I only need to look at my children and it passes.

“Those are yours,” I say. “One for each of you. That’s what she’d want.”