We hung it with paper snowflakes and cheap string lights and the ornaments the kids had made at school — a clay handprint, a photo in a popsicle-stick frame, a lopsided felt reindeer.

On Christmas Eve we ate pancakes on the blanket on the living-room floor, because a tradition we’d built out of survival had, somewhere along the way, become something we chose on purpose.

My mother, my father, and Brooke called, over and over, and I let every one of them go to voicemail.

My mother said Christmas belonged to family. My father suggested we all just avoid the uncomfortable history. Brooke cried, and said she missed the children.

Trevor sent nothing at all. He never did.

The sadness came later, after the three of them were asleep and the apartment was quiet and the cheap lights were the only thing on.