When it ended, he said, “Play it again.” I played it again.

And somewhere in the second listening I heard my brother begin, very quietly, to cry — not the way you cry at sad news, but the way you cry when a thing you spent thirty years insisting was fine turns out to have been exactly as bad as the frightened child inside you always knew it was.

He had needed to hear it twice, he told me later, because the first time his mind did what it had always done and started translating it into something survivable — she’s just old, she doesn’t mean it, it wasn’t that bad. The second time he made himself hear the actual words.

“She’s proud of it,” he said, when he could talk.

“Marlena.

She’s not sorry.