I had decided a long time ago that I would not give Elke Trask that.

She had taken ten years; she did not get to take the inside of my head, or my children’s, for the rest of our lives.

So I taught them, in a thousand small moments like that one in the car, to set down what was not theirs — to feel the sadness cleanly and let it pass through, to grieve the grandfather they’d lost without taking on the guilt or the rage or the shame that belonged to the adults who had failed them.

It is the hardest thing I have ever tried to teach, and I am not certain I have fully learned it myself.