It was not the price of a big family.

Plenty of big families gather for years and split the check like adults and never once turn a member into a mechanism.

The dread had not come from the size of them.

It had come from the arrangement, and the arrangement had just ended, in a restaurant across town, in a leather folder, and the hum had switched off, and in the silence it left I could hear myself think for the first time in two years.

The silence where the dread had been was so complete that it felt almost like a sound of its own, the way a room rings for a second after a machine you had stopped hearing finally switches off.