Rachel was crying now, openly, but I had lived long enough to know that not all tears are grief, and hers were not for me.

Hers were the tears of a person who has just understood that she is going to be caught.

I have been asked, since, whether I felt any satisfaction in that moment, watching my daughter-in-law realize the walls were closing in, and the honest answer is no, or at least not the clean triumphant satisfaction people seem to expect.

What I felt was closer to a deep and weary sorrow, the particular sorrow of watching a slow catastrophe reach the point where it can no longer be stopped.

I had known this moment was coming for weeks; I had, in a sense, built it.