And I told my own stupid stories from the year, the ones I had never had anyone to tell: the disastrous chemistry lab, the vending machine that ate everyone’s money, the English teacher who quoted movies wrong on purpose to see who’d correct him.

And for the first time in what felt like a geological age, actual laughter rang off the walls of our house — real laughter, loud and helpless and warm — and I swear I could feel it doing something to the place, scrubbing at the grief that had soaked into the plaster since November, lifting it, thinning it, letting a little light back into rooms that had been dark a long time.

I had not laughed like that in seven months.

I realized it in the middle of doing it — that specific, slightly startling recognition, when your body does something it has not done in so long that the doing of it feels almost foreign.