“Let’s just get it over with.

It was an ungracious way to agree, and I knew it even as I said it, and Abigail took it anyway with the grace she has always had more of than I do.

She did not point out that she had been trying to help me toward this for years.

She did not remind me that she was grieving too, that they had been her brothers, that she had lost them at an age when a girl needs her older brothers and then simply had to go on without them.

She just handed me a box and started, gently, on the near shelf, and let me come to the thing at my own broken pace, which is a kind of patience I am not sure I could have shown in her place.”