There was nothing to be said to a woman reading her dead friend’s last words off a sheet of paper, no comfort that would not have been an intrusion, no observation that would not have made it smaller.

Davis understood that, the way he had understood in the cockpit when to hand her the controls and when to take them back, and he simply stayed, a solid present weight in the room, and let her have the thing without trying to manage it.

People reached so often for words in the presence of grief, she thought, because the silence frightened them, because sitting in it felt like doing nothing.

It was not nothing.