My face actually ached from it.

And underneath the laughing there was a thin thread of something that was not quite guilt but lived near it: the strange, disloyal-feeling lightness of being happy again in a house where two people I loved would never sit at this table.

I think a lot of grieving people know that particular ambush — the moment joy comes back and you flinch from it, as though feeling good were a betrayal of the ones you lost, as though staying miserable were a way of staying faithful to them.

I felt it flicker, that night, for just a second.