We weren’t there.

That’s the part I have to keep saying, even to myself, because the scene has taken on such shape in my memory that it feels like I watched it.

I didn’t.

My daughters and I spent that last Thanksgiving in a half-empty house with our lives in boxes, eating an unfussy dinner off two plates and two paper ones, our flight to California booked for the next morning.

It was the quietest holiday we’d had in years, and I remember being astonished by how much I liked the quiet.