My grandmother mourned them, in her way, quietly, the boy with the toy hammer and the son who came after — but she did not chase them, or write to them, or reopen the door, because she understood the difference, by then, between grieving a person and continuing to be harmed by them.

On a cold, clear December evening, almost a year to the day after I picked her up from that nursing-home lobby, Grandma Eleanor and I walked out onto the front porch to watch the first light snow fall over the garden.

The air was crisp and still, and the snowflakes drifted down through the pines, dusting the porch railing white.

She leaned against my arm, wrapped in her wool shawl, looking out over the land her husband had cleared with his own hands fifty years before, and she took a long, peaceful breath of the cold air.