How, I thought, my mind beginning to move very fast and very cold now, could she possibly have known that something bad was coming — unless she already knew what it was?

That question changed the shape of everything, standing in that corridor, because it meant this was not an accident that a family was scrambling to cover up after the fact.

It meant that some of them had known, in advance, that a catastrophe was coming — had known enough, that morning, to send me a warning to get my own child clear of it.

And a warning sent in advance is not grief.

It is foreknowledge.

My mother-in-law had not learned of a tragedy and reacted to it; she had been told of a plan and had made a small, cowardly, calculating peace with it.