Four empty places at the dinner table, and I set them for years — not literally, I was not so far gone as that, but in the way I cooked too much food out of an old habit my hands would not unlearn, in the way my eye still counted the room and came up four short.

The body keeps its own arithmetic long after the mind has accepted the terrible new sum.

Six years on I would still, some evenings, make enough for eight, and stand looking at the surplus, and understand all over again, as if for the first time, that there was no one coming to eat it.

Somewhere in those years, the girls stopped asking when their brothers were coming home.

There had been a time, early on, when the youngest especially would ask, and I would have to find words, and the words were always inadequate and always devastating.