I keep returning to the ordinariness of her face in that moment, because it is the detail that has done the most to change how I move through the world.

She did not look like a monster.

That is the whole terrible lesson of it.

She looked exactly like my mother — the same silver-and-silk elegance, the same faint impatience around the mouth, the same face that had looked down at me over birthday cakes my entire life.

There was no flicker of it visible, no tell, no crack through which the truth of what she was doing might have shown.

She served death with the same composed, slightly bored grace with which she had served a thousand ordinary desserts, and she felt, I am sure, no need to perform grief or love, because it did not occur to her that anyone was watching closely enough to require the performance.