They had simply had a scheduling conflict, months ago, that I was being awfully dramatic about.

And now here was an engagement party, and surely I’d come, and surely by now I’d have gotten over whatever it was.

I did not answer any of it.

Not out of strategy, at first — I did not yet have a plan, in those months.

I simply had nothing to say to them, no words that could cross the distance between a woman burying her whole family and people who had chosen a steak dinner over standing beside her while she did it.

There was no sentence that reached.