I did not yet know how completely he had prepared me to survive the people I’d married into.

But I was about to find out.

My father had been a quiet, careful man — an engineer by training and by temperament, someone who believed that most disasters were simply the sum of small precautions no one had bothered to take.

He used to say that the time to think clearly is never during the emergency; the emergency is for executing what you already decided when your head was cold.

He had drilled it into me the way other fathers taught their children to swim or ride a bike: that when everything in you is screaming, that is precisely the moment to go quiet and watch and preserve, because the loud, weeping, panicking version of you destroys the very evidence the calm version will need.

I had thought, growing up, that it was just his way, the fussy wisdom of a man who labeled his tool drawers.