Garrett went pale and started to stammer.

“We — we’d been drinking, Megan, it was a joke, it didn’t mean—”

“A joke,” Megan said, “about a man dying alone in a cold house.”

“Megan, stay out of family business,” Garrett snapped, and it was the wrong thing to say, and I saw her hear how wrong it was.

She took a step back from him, and then another, shaking her head, and she did not come back to his side for the rest of what happened.

I have wondered, since, about Megan — a young woman I barely knew, who had wandered into the middle of my family’s reckoning as an outsider and a guest, and who turned out to be the only person in that room besides me capable of a simple, uncomplicated moral reaction.