She wasn’t sure until Maddy, seven, wearing pink, long-sleeved pajamas, woke her one noon asking for cereal, asking who that was beside her. Gillian rolled over to find in her bed a hatchet-faced, ponytailed man with cigarette burns studding his upturned arms. That’s when she knew. It was about oblivion, the swirling pain we embrace hoping to eclipse the greater, harder pain of loss. Things hadn’t
