Not cruelly — he never once made me feel small himself — but he hated watching me shrink.

“You don’t have to make yourself smaller,” he told me once, early in our marriage, after a tense dinner with my father, “just because somebody else decides to get louder.”

I rolled my eyes at him at the time.

It sounded like the easy wisdom of a man who had never had to survive Gerald Baldwin across a breakfast table for eighteen years.

But after Declan died, that one sentence came back to me nearly every day, in his voice, until it stopped being his and started, slowly, to become mine.