The chair had never been small.

Nothing that holds twenty years of a person you loved is small.

She had been trained, patiently, over years, to accept other people’s measurements of her own grief — and the chair, returned to its place in the sunlight, was the first thing she had ever refused to let them measure for her.

That word — measure — was the one that stayed with her, because she understood now that it named the subtlest and most damaging thing that had been done to her over five years.

It is a thing done constantly to grieving people, and to sensitive people, and to anyone whose losses are inconvenient to those around them: the quiet, persistent reassignment of scale. It’s just a chair.