I thought I knew the man I had been dating for eighteen months. Daniel felt like home—a promise of stability and warmth that I hadn’t known I was looking for. We had met on a rainy afternoon when he accidentally bumped my elbow in a crowded coffee shop, spilling my latte and offering a charming, heartfelt apology. He was thirty-four to my twenty-eight, and those six years seemed to provide him with a groundedness that I found intoxicating. He was the man who planned our weekends two weeks in advance and never failed to text me to ensure I’d made it home safely.

However, every relationship has its shadows, and Daniel’s was cast by the memory of his late wife, Stephanie. Early in our dating life, he told me she had died in a car accident years ago. The subject was clearly a wound that hadn’t fully healed; his smile would fade whenever her name surfaced at social gatherings, and he would deftly steer the conversation elsewhere. I respected his silence, assuming the grief was simply too heavy to carry in the light of day.

Then there was Leo, Daniel’s fourteen-year-old son. For over a year, Leo was a ghost in our relationship—a name mentioned with a sigh of protective caution. “I just need to be sure,” Daniel would say when I asked to meet him. “Leo has been through so much. I have to be certain this is real for all of us.” I admired his devotion as a father, believing he was shielding a grieving child from the potential pain of another loss.