But I’m not going to be nice about him at Christmas and you don’t get to ask me to.”

Which was a fair settlement and which has held for three years.

My parents are the harder one and I have not solved it.

My mother wept on the telephone for about forty minutes in the October and then, within about three weeks, arrived at a position that she has held ever since, which is that Davis was not himself and that people do terrible things in grief and that she hopes I will not carry it.

She is seventy-one and she means it kindly and she is, I am fairly sure, saying it for herself rather than for me, because the alternative is believing that her daughter was in a hospital bed for two days while this happened and she was not called, and that the reason she was not called is that nobody thought she needed to be.