He tried to speak, and found nothing, because there was nothing to say that the cold, absolute finality in his mother’s eyes had not already answered.

Without another word, my parents picked up their empty packing boxes — the boxes they had brought to carry away her life — and carried them, empty, back to their car in complete defeat.

I helped, as she had asked me to.

I carried a box of nothing out to my father’s SUV and set it in the trunk, and my father did not look at me, and I did not look at him, and there was nothing between us in that moment but the weight of a thing that could not be undone.

Chapter 14 — The Empty Road