The Silent Fall: One Year After the Solstice Cascade, a World Unplugged and Unmapped

By Dr. Elias Vance, Senior Investigative Correspondent | October 25, 2026

The nursery at Adelaide Cottage was ready. Pink blankets, handpainted animals, a cradle waiting beneath the window. But when Queen Camila crossed the threshold 3 days after the birth, her arms were empty. Behind her, Kate sat motionless, staring at nothing. William stood frozen in the doorway, his hands clenched, unable to look at the cradle that would never hold his daughter. Rose, Catherine, Elizabeth, 17 hours of life, then gone.

George, Charlotte, and Louie asked questions William couldn’t answer. Charles revealed a loss he’d hidden for 40 years. The press would descend. Protocol demanded they carry on. And then Camila, the woman Kate had kept at arms length for years. The outsider, the one who didn’t belong, did something no one expected. She lifted the empty cradle into her arms, pressed her face against the pink blankets, and whispered the words that changed everything. She was supposed to come home.

William hadn’t moved from the chair in 3 hours, maybe 4. Time had stopped meaning much of anything since Tuesday afternoon, since the moment the doctor’s face had changed, since the phrase cardiac anomaly had rearranged the architecture of his entire world. The living room at Adelaide Cottage was still dark. Dawn just beginning to bruise the edges of the windows, and he sat perfectly still in the leather armchair by the cold fireplace, his phone face down on the side table, vibrating every few minutes with messages he couldn’t bring himself to read.

The house was too quiet. George, Charlotte, and Louie had left yesterday with Carol and Michael, bundled into the car with their overnight bags and confused, frightened faces. Charlotte had cried. Louie had asked when the baby was coming home. George, 9 years old, and already carrying the weight of what he’d someday become, had said nothing at all, just looked at his father with eyes that understood too much. William had stood in the driveway and watched them go. Kate’s hand, limp in his, and he’d felt the silence settle over the house like snow, heavy, suffocating. Final.

His phone lit up again. Another message. He didn’t look. They were all the same: world leaders expressing condolences in carefully worded statements. Distant cousins offering prayers, friends who didn’t know what to say, but said something anyway. He’d stopped reading them sometime around midnight. The words blurred together. So sorry for your loss. Our hearts are with you. If there’s anything we can do, there was nothing anyone could do.

Rose Catherine Elizabeth, born Tuesday at 4:47 a.m. died Wednesday at 9:23 a.m. 17 hours. That was all they’d had. 17 hours of hope turning to fear, turning to frantic, helpless, watching as the monitors beeped. And the doctors used words like complications and do everything we can. And then finally, inevitably, I’m so sorry. He kept replaying the moment they’d first placed her in his arms. She’d been so small, impossibly small. Her fingers like flower petals, her face perfect and pink, except for the faint bluish tint around her mouth that the nurse had tried to explain away. Sometimes newborns take a bit to pink up fully, she’d said. But her smile hadn’t reached her eyes, and William had known. Even then, he’d known something was wrong. Kate had known, too. She’d looked at Rose and then looked at William, and in that glance, they’d shared everything they couldn’t say out loud. “Please let her be okay. Please.”

She hadn’t been okay. Upstairs, Kate hadn’t left the bedroom since they’d come home from the hospital. She’d walked through the front door, climbed the stairs, and disappeared into their room, closing the door with a soft click that had sounded to William like the end of something. He’d brought her tea that had gone cold. Toast she hadn’t touched. She’d said nothing, only stared at the wall with eyes that looked through him, through everything at some terrible distance only she could see. He didn’t know how to reach her, didn’t know if he should try or give her space or break down the door and hold her until one of them could breathe again. He was a prince, a future king, trained in diplomacy and duty, and keeping his composure under impossible circumstances. But no one had taught him this. No one had taught him how to survive the death of his daughter.

His phone rang, not a text this time, an actual call. The ringtone shattering the silence. William stared at it for three rings before he picked it up, saw his father’s name on the screen, and answered without thinking. “Yes.” His voice sounded like someone else’s. Hollow, flat.

“William.” Charles’s voice was careful, quiet. The way people speak around the newly bereaved, as though grief were something fragile that might shatter if handled roughly. “I know there are no words, but your mother and I, we want to come today.”

William stood suddenly unable to sit still and began pacing the length of the living room, his free hand clenched and unclenched at his side. “Kate isn’t. She’s not ready for visitors.”

“We’re not visitors, William.” A pause. “We’re family.” The word landed strangely. Family? Yes, they were family, but the institution they belonged to had never much prioritized that particular fact. Duty came first. Protocol, the smooth operation of the monarchy. Family was something you fit in around the edges in the stolen moments between engagements, in the careful choreography of public appearances that looked like intimacy, but rarely were.

“I don’t know if—” William stopped mid-sentence, midstep, the words tangling in his throat. “I don’t know how to help her. I don’t know what to say to the children. I don’t know anything.” The admission felt like failure.

“I know,” Charles said. And something in his voice made William’s chest tighten. “When your mother and I lost the baby between you and Harry, no one let us grieve. We were told to carry on. Three days of private mourning, then back to work, back to normal, as though normal were even possible.”

 

William stopped walking. “What?”

“You didn’t know? It wasn’t a question,” Charles sighed. A long exhalation that carried decades of buried sorrow. “1982. Your mother was four months along, a boy. They never told anyone outside the immediate household. No public announcement, no acknowledgement. It simply didn’t happen as far as the world was concerned. But it happened for us. It happened.”

William lowered himself slowly onto the arm of the sofa, his legs suddenly unsteady. A brother? He’d almost had another brother. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because that’s what we did then. That’s what we’d always done. Keep the pain private. Protect the institution. Your grandmother, God rest her, she meant well. But she’d been raised in a different time. Grief was weakness. Weakness was unacceptable.” Charles’s voice hardened slightly. “I won’t let that happen to you. Do you understand me? I won’t let anyone tell you to simply carry on. Take the time you need, both of you.”

William pressed his palm against his forehead, trying to process this revelation on top of everything else. His father, stoic, formal, duty-bound Charles, had carried this loss for 43 years without ever speaking of it. “How did you do that? How did you bury something that deep and still function?”

“Will it ever stop hurting?” William asked, and he sounded even to himself like a child.

“No,” Charles’s honesty was almost brutal. “But you learn to carry it. You learn to live with the shape of it, and you don’t do it alone. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Let us come. Let us help.”

William thought of Kate upstairs, silent and unreachable. He thought of George, Charlotte, and Louie at their grandparents’ house, waiting for answers he didn’t know how to give. He thought of the empty nursery, the cradle they’d set up last month, the pink blankets that would never wrap around Rose’s tiny body. “All right,” he said finally. “Come. We’ll be there in an hour.”

William ended the call and sat in the semi-darkness, holding his phone, staring at nothing. Then he stood, smoothed his shirt, wrinkled, slept in, not that it mattered, and headed for the stairs. Kate needed to know they were coming. Kate needed something. Anything, even if he didn’t know what.

The door to the nursery was ajar. William hadn’t expected that. He’d thought Kate would be in their bedroom, still curled beneath the duvet, still staring at the wall. But the bedroom was empty, the bed unmade. And when he walked down the hallway, he saw the thin line of golden morning light spilling from the nursery doorway.

He pushed the door open slowly. Kate sat on the floor beside the cradle, her back against the wall, her legs pulled up to her chest. She was wearing the same clothes she’d worn home from the hospital, soft gray trousers and one of his old jumpers, the sleeves pushed up to her elbows. In her hands, she held something small and pink, a hat, the tiny knit hat they’d bought in those optimistic weeks before the birth when they’d thought they were preparing for joy.

She wasn’t crying. She’d cried for hours on Tuesday night: great, wrenching sobs that had shaken her entire body while William held her and felt utterly, devastatingly useless. But now her face was dry, her eyes red-rimmed but tearless, and William understood that she’d moved past crying into some hollow space beyond it, the place where grief lived when it had nowhere else to go.

He sat down beside her, his shoulder touching hers, the way they’d always done things. Side by side, together, facing whatever came. For a long time, neither of them spoke.

“I keep thinking I hear her,” Kate said finally, her voice barely above a whisper. “That phantom cry thing they warn you about in the books.” Except she never got to cry. “Not really. Just—just that one little sound in the delivery room, and then nothing.”

William’s throat closed. He remembered that sound, that single soft mewl, barely audible, that had given them 30 seconds of hope before the monitors had started beeping, before the medical team had swarmed, before everything had gone wrong.

“I don’t know if we should take this down,” Kate continued, gesturing vaguely at the nursery around them, the cream-colored walls with their handpainted woodland creatures, the mobile hanging above the cradle, the changing table stocked with nappies they’d never use. “Do we leave it? Do we pack it away? What’s the protocol for this?”

“There is no protocol.” William reached over and took her hand. Her fingers were cold. “We do whatever feels right. And if nothing feels right, we do nothing.”

Kate turned the little pink hat over in her hands, tracing the delicate knit pattern. “How do I face the children? They were so excited. Louie made her a drawing. He drew all five of us holding hands—him, George, Charlotte, you, me, and Rose in the middle. He’d never even met her, but he drew her anyway.”

The image broke something in William’s chest. Louie, who was only five, who still believed the world was fundamentally kind, who’d drawn his baby sister into existence with crayons and hope.

“We tell them the truth,” William said, though he had no idea if that was right. “We tell them we’re sad. We tell them it’s okay to be sad. We tell them we’ll get through it together.”

Kate finally looked at him, her eyes searching his face. “How? How do we get through it?”

“I don’t know.” It was the most honest thing he’d said in days. “Your father called,” he added after a moment. “He and Camila want to come today. I said yes. I hope that’s—I should have asked you first.” He expected protest or at least resistance. Kate valued her privacy fiercely, and the idea of hosting anyone, even family, in the middle of this seemed like too much.

But she surprised him. “Good,” she said quietly, “because I can’t do this alone. And neither can you.”

The sound of car tires on gravel drifted through the open window. They’d arrived.

William stood at the window, watching the black Range Rover pull up the drive. His father emerged first, moving more slowly than William remembered, his shoulders slightly hunched. Charles looked older. Or maybe William was just seeing him differently now, seeing him as a man who’d also lost a child, who’d carried that loss in silence for more than 40 years.

Camila stepped out next, and William noticed she was carrying a wicker basket. Always practical, Camila. Always thinking of the small, necessary things like food and tea when the people around her forgot to eat, forgot to function.

William moved to the front door before they could knock. He didn’t want the sound to disturb Kate, who’d said she’d come downstairs in a minute, but might need more than a minute, might need an hour, might need a lifetime. He opened the door.

Charles didn’t say anything at first. He just looked at his son, really looked at him, and then pulled him into an embrace. It was so unexpected, so unlike their usual formal greetings, that William stood frozen for several seconds before his arms came up, and he held on. His father smelled like cologne and wool, familiar and foreign at once, and William realized he couldn’t remember the last time they’d hugged like this. Really hugged. Not the careful shoulder pats they performed for cameras.

When they separated, Camila was wiping her eyes with a tissue. Her face was blotchy, her eyes red-rimmed. She’d been crying. The realization startled him.

“We brought lunch,” she said, her voice rough. “You both need to eat.”

William nodded, though food was the last thing on his mind. “Kate’s upstairs. She’s—I don’t know what she is.”

Camila shifted the basket to one arm and placed her free hand briefly on his cheek, a gesture so motherly, so tender that William felt something crack inside him. “Then I’ll go to her,” she said simply. And before William could respond, before he could warn her that Kate might not want company, might not want anything, Camila was already moving toward the stairs, her footsteps purposeful and soft.

William and Charles stood in the entrance hall, the door still open behind them. Morning light pooling on the hardwood floor.

“She’ll know what to say,” Charles said quietly. “Camila, she’s good at this. Better than I ever was.”

William looked at his father and saw grief there, old and new, layered like sediment. “You really lost a baby between me and Harry?”

“We really did. I’m sorry I didn’t know.”

“That’s what I’m trying to change,” Charles said. “The not knowing, the silence. It didn’t serve us then. It won’t serve you now.”

Upstairs, William heard Camila’s voice, low and warm, and then Kate’s, softer. He couldn’t make out the words, but the tone was enough. Connection, understanding, the beginning of something that might eventually resemble healing.

Charles placed a hand on William’s shoulder. “Come on, let’s make tea, and then we’ll figure out the rest.”

They walked toward the kitchen together, leaving the front door open, the morning air drifting in, carrying with it the scent of cut grass and life continuing, even when it felt impossible that it should.

Camila’s hand trembled slightly as it met the banister. She noticed it, the tremor, the way her fingers looked older in the morning light streaming through the landing window, and took a breath before starting up the stairs. One step, two.

The house was beautiful in that effortless way Kate had of making spaces feel like homes rather than showpieces. Photographs on the walls, the children’s artwork framed and hung with the same care as oil paintings, a scuff mark on the baseboard where someone’s shoe had scraped, left unfixed because it was evidence of life being lived.

She was thinking about Eleanor. She hadn’t thought about Eleanor in months, not consciously. Anyway, the grief had become so old, so thoroughly integrated into the architecture of her being that it lived beneath conscious thought most days. But climbing these stairs toward a woman she barely knew, toward a nursery that held an empty cradle, Eleanor was suddenly everywhere.

23 years old, married to Andrew, pregnant for the first time, five months along when she’d slipped on the wet tile in the bathroom at Bolehyde Manor. Just slipped. Such a small thing. Her hip had hit the edge of the tub, and she’d known immediately, the way women sometimes know that something was wrong. They told her not to name the baby. “It will make it harder,” the doctor had said, as though grief operated on some economy of attachment, as though not naming your child could somehow make them less real, less lost. She’d named her anyway: Eleanor, after her grandmother. Eleanor Mary Parker-Bowles, who had lived for exactly zero days but had still managed to change everything.

There had been another two years later, a boy that time, 11 weeks gone, before she’d even told Andrew’s parents. That one she hadn’t named. She’d followed the rules the second time, as though obedience might protect her from the howling emptiness, but it hadn’t mattered. Named or unnamed, the loss was the same.

She paused outside the nursery door. Inside, nothing. No sound, no movement, just the terrible quiet of a space waiting for a life that would never fill it. Camila pressed her palm flat against the door and closed her eyes. She’d held Laura’s babies, Tom’s babies. She’d been grandmother, grand, had tied tiny shoes and read bedtime stories, and felt that particular joy that grandmothers feel. But with Charles’s grandchildren, she’d always been held at a careful distance. Not their real grandmother, not Diana, the other one. The one who existed at the periphery of family photographs, whose presence was tolerated, but never quite celebrated. And Rose. She’d never even met Rose, would never meet her now.

Camila knocked once softly, then opened the door without waiting for permission. Some instincts were maternal, no matter how complicated the relationship. Kate needed someone, and Camila was here, and that would have to be enough.

Kate sat exactly where William had left her, on the floor beside the cradle. The pink hat still clutched in her hands. She looked up when Camila entered, and her face, pale, hollowed out by grief, registered something that might have been surprise or might have been relief.

“Hello, darling,” Camila said quietly.

Kate said nothing, just looked at her with eyes that held everything and nothing at once.

Camila lowered herself to the floor, her knees protesting the movement in a way they wouldn’t have 10 years ago. She settled beside Kate, their shoulders not quite touching, and for a long moment neither of them spoke. The silence wasn’t awkward. It was full, dense with shared understanding, with the particular language of loss that women sometimes speak without words. The morning light fell through the window in golden bars, illuminating the mobile that hung above the cradle. Soft fabric birds in pastel colors, meant to dance and spin above a baby’s wandering eyes. They hung motionless now.

“May I?” Camila asked, gesturing toward the cradle.

Kate nodded.

Camila reached over and lifted the cradle carefully into her lap. It was lighter than she’d expected, wicker and white paint. The interior lined with pink blankets that still held their shop-fresh creases. She ran her fingers over the blankets, feeling the softness, imagining the baby who should have been wrapped in them. Her throat tightened.

“I had the same one made for my first,” she said, her voice low and careful. “She was supposed to come home, too.”

Kate’s head turned sharply. “What?”

“1976. I was five months along. A girl.” Camila kept her eyes on the cradle, on the pink blankets. Because looking at Kate would have undone her completely. “I fell. It was such a stupid thing. Wet tile. One moment of lost balance, and then she was gone. They tried to save her, but her lungs weren’t developed enough. She lived for four hours.”

The room seemed to hold its breath.

“They told me not to name her,” Camila continued. “The doctors, the family. They said it would make it harder, as though grief came with an instruction manual. But I did anyway. Eleanor. Eleanor Mary.”

Kate’s face crumpled, and suddenly the tears that had been locked away came flooding out. Not the wrenching sobs of two days ago, but something quieter and somehow more devastating.

“No one told me about her,” Kate whispered.

“No one tells anyone about these babies,” Camila said. “We’re meant to carry on, aren’t we? Stiff upper lip. Keep calm. Don’t make a fuss. I went to a luncheon three weeks later and smiled for the cameras because that’s what was expected.” She looked at Kate now, holding her gaze. “You named yours Rose. That’s perfect. She was real. She mattered.”

“She mattered,” Kate repeated, as though testing the words, seeing if they could hold the sheer weight of everything she felt.

“There was another,” Camila said. “Two years later, 11 weeks. I didn’t name him, because I’d learned my lesson, or so I thought. But unnamed or not, he was still mine, still lost.”

Kate shifted, and then slowly, hesitantly, she leaned her head against Camila’s shoulder. The gesture was so unexpected, so vulnerable that Camila had to close her eyes against the surge of emotion. She wrapped one arm around Kate’s shoulders and held her while she cried, while the morning turned the room golden and warm around them.

“Charles told me something once,” Camila said after a while, “about Diana. She used to say she could feel the baby boy they’d lost, the one between William and Harry. She’d dream about him. Wonder what he would have looked like. What kind of boy he’d have been. Charles never knew how to grieve him properly. The Firm didn’t allow it. Three days of privacy, then back to work. Your grandmother, his mother, she meant well. But she’d been raised in a time when emotion was something shameful. Weakness.”

Kate pulled back enough to look at Camila’s face. “William just found out about that baby this morning. He never knew.”

“Of course he didn’t. That’s the problem, isn’t it? We’ve spent generations not talking about these losses, pretending they didn’t happen, and all we’ve done is make the grief lonelier.”

Camila adjusted the cradle in her lap, her fingers still moving over the pink blankets in a gesture that was almost soothing, almost like rocking. “Do you know what the worst part was? After Eleanor died,” Kate shook her head. “People stopped knowing what to say to me. Friends would cross the street rather than face me. Family members would change the subject if I mentioned her. It was as though she’d never existed at all. As though I’d imagined the whole thing.” Camila’s voice was steady, but her eyes were bright with unshed tears. “I won’t let that happen to you. Rose was here. She was real, and you’re allowed to grieve her for as long as you need.”

“How do you survive it?” Kate asked, and the question was so raw, so desperate that it hung in the air between them like a prayer.

Camila considered this. She thought about the last 49 years, about the candles she still lit on Eleanor’s birthday, about the way loss had become part of her landscape rather than something she’d conquered. “You don’t survive it,” she said finally. “You carry it. Some days it’s heavier than others. Some days you forget for a moment and then you remember, and the forgetting feels like betrayal. But you carry it, and eventually—not soon, but eventually—you learn to carry it with grace.”

Kate was quiet for a long moment, her head still resting on Camila’s shoulder, her hand reaching out to touch the edge of the cradle. “I don’t feel very graceful right now.”

“You’re not meant to. Not yet.” Camila pressed her cheek against the top of Kate’s head. “But you will. And until then, you have people who will carry it with you.”

In the doorway, neither woman noticed Charles standing there. He’d come upstairs to check on them. But seeing them like this, his wife and his daughter-in-law folded together in shared grief, the empty cradle between them, he couldn’t bring himself to intrude. He backed away quietly, his heart full of something he couldn’t quite name, and headed back downstairs to where William waited.

William stood at the kettle, watching it boil, while Charles unpacked the wicker basket Camila had brought: sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, a tin of biscuits, a thermos of soup. It was so thoroughly practical, so Camila, that William felt something in his chest loosen slightly. Someone was thinking about the details, the small necessary things like eating and drinking, because he certainly wasn’t.

Charles worked with surprising efficiency, laying out plates, finding the butter in the fridge, setting the sandwiches on a serving platter as though he’d done this a thousand times. Maybe he had, in his own home when the staff were away. But William couldn’t remember ever seeing his father do something this domestic, this ordinary.

“Camila loved her before she was born, you know,” Charles said without looking up. “She bought that cradle months ago. Had it restored. She spent weeks finding the perfect one.”

William’s hand stilled on the kettle handle. “I didn’t know.”

“There’s a great deal you don’t know,” Charles’s voice was gentle, not accusatory. “About loss, about duty during loss, about how this family has handled grief for generations.” He paused, arranging sandwiches with careful precision. “Your great-grandmother, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, she lost a son, Baby John. He died at less than a day old sometime around 1871. She was given three days of private mourning, then back to work, back to the business of being royal.”

William turned fully from the kettle, which was whistling now, ignored. “That’s barbaric.”

“That’s the Crown,” Charles met his son’s eyes. “But you’re not king yet, and I’m not your grandmother. Take the time you need, both of you. Weeks, months, whatever it takes. The institution can wait.”

“Can it?” William heard the bitterness in his own voice. “Because I’ve spent my whole life being told it can’t. That duty comes first. That personal feelings are secondary to the smooth operation of the monarchy.”

“I was told that, too.” Charles set down the last sandwich and moved closer to his son. “And I believed it for far too long. Do you know what I regret most about your childhood? About Harry’s?”

William shook his head.

“That I wasn’t there enough. That I let duty become an excuse for absence. That I didn’t hold you when your mother died because I didn’t know how. Because my own father never taught me. Because somewhere along the line, we decided that being royal meant being less human.” Charles’s hand came to rest on William’s shoulder, and his grip was firm, anchoring. “Don’t make my mistakes. Don’t let them tell you to simply carry on. Rose mattered. Your grief matters. Kate’s grief matters.”

The kettle was screaming now, and William still couldn’t move. His father’s hand on his shoulder, the permission he’d just been given to fall apart, the acknowledgment that maybe, maybe personal pain could take precedence over institutional duty. It was too much. Everything was too much.

“I don’t know how to do this,” William said, and his voice broke on the last word.

“Neither do I,” Charles said. “But we’ll figure it out together.” And then William was crying, really crying. Not the controlled tears he’d shed at the hospital, or the silent grief he’d carried alone in the dark living room, but great, gasping sobs that shook his entire body. Charles pulled him close, held him the way he’d held him as a child, as a young boy grieving his mother, and William clung to his father and let himself break.

They stood like that for a long time, the kettle screaming its alarm, neither of them moving to silence it until finally Charles reached over with one hand and switched it off. The sudden quiet was almost shocking.

“Thank you,” William managed, pulling back and wiping his face with his sleeve.

“Don’t thank me. Just promise me you’ll let yourself feel this. All of it. For as long as it takes.”

Footsteps on the stairs interrupted them—soft, slow, the sound of women who’d been crying and were now trying to compose themselves. William straightened, dried his eyes properly with a tea towel, and tried to look less wrecked than he felt.

Kate and Camila appeared in the doorway, and William saw immediately that something had shifted between them. They stood closer together than they had before. Kate’s hand rested lightly on Camila’s arm. Camila’s eyes were red but calm.

“Tea?” William offered, his voice still rough.

Kate nodded. “Tea would be good.”

They sat around the kitchen table, four people who’d started the morning as separate islands of grief and were now somehow a fragile archipelago of shared understanding. No one was particularly hungry, but they all took sandwiches, passed plates, poured tea, going through the motions of normalcy, because sometimes that’s all you can do. Kate broke her sandwich into smaller pieces but didn’t eat. Camila took small, deliberate bites. Charles and William mostly just held their cups of tea, grateful for something to do with their hands.

“Tell me more about Eleanor,” Kate said suddenly. “What would she have been like?”

Camila’s face softened. “I used to wonder that every birthday. She’d be 49 now, middle-aged. Can you imagine? I’d picture her with children of her own, with my grandchildren.” She trailed off, then smiled sadly. “I lit a candle for her every year on what would have been her birthday. Still do. It seems important, somehow, to mark the day.”

Kate’s teacup rattled slightly as she set it down. “Do you think, would it be strange if we did something like that for Rose?”

“I think it would be beautiful,” Charles said immediately.

The conversation drifted tentatively to the children, how to talk to George, Charlotte, and Louie. How to help them understand something that none of the adults understood themselves.

“George already carries so much,” William said, staring into his tea. “He knows what’s coming for him eventually, the weight of it. How do I explain that his sister is gone before he even got to know her? How do I add that to everything else he’s already trying to process?”

Camila, who’d been quiet, spoke up. “You let him be sad. You let him ask questions. And you tell him that Rose was real. That’s the most important thing. You keep her real for him, and for yourselves.” She looked at Kate, a knowing, shared glance. “We’ll light a candle for Rose too, every year. And we’ll tell them she was supposed to come home.”