Nadia lost a pregnancy at nineteen weeks, three years ago. She has never said the date out loud to anybody, including her husband, and she works the whole day every year and comes home wrecked and does not know why.

She picks the smallest of the four. A name. She writes it on one line, in a notebook, on a Sunday afternoon. That is the entire exercise, and it takes about four seconds, and she cries for twenty minutes afterwards.

Two weeks later she tells her sister. Not the story, and not the hospital, and not the phone call. One sentence with the name in it.

Her sister says the name back to her. That is all that happens.

Nadia says afterwards that it was the first time the child had existed anywhere other than inside her own head, and that nothing about the grief got smaller, but something about carrying it did.