But I was somewhere low and shut, in the dark with the heat turned down, and I could feel how easy it would be to stay there — to let the shop go dark for good, to sink back into the grey leaking sameness, to make my world small enough that nothing could ask anything of me again.

Grief offers you that, quietly, as if it were mercy: the permission to stop.

And on the other side of a pane of glass stood a sixteen-year-old boy who would not let me take it.

That is the whole difference, I think, between the people who close back up after a loss and the people who slowly open — not strength, not character, nothing you can take credit for, but only whether, at the low hour, there happens to be someone on the other side of the door who has decided your dark window is their business.

Franny had spent thirty-one years being that someone for a whole street.