The adults in that room had already accepted a narrative.

There was a signed document.

There was a doctor who had said the words.

There was a casket, and a wake, and all the heavy machinery of a death that everyone had agreed had happened.

And once you have accepted that a thing is over, you stop looking at it.

That is what grief and protocol and social expectation do, together: they close the question.

Every adult in that house had closed the question of whether Mark was alive, because the authorities had closed it for them, and so not one of us was still truly looking.