I looked at my sister through the glass for a long moment. We thought you were being dramatic. My husband and both of my children, dead in a single morning, and my family’s interpretation had been that I was being dramatic — that my grief was a performance, a bid for attention, a thing designed to inconvenience Sabrina’s party.

“It was a birthday dinner,” I said, staring straight into her eyes.

“You picked a restaurant over three wooden caskets.

And three days later, while I was learning how to live in a house full of dead people’s things, our mother texted me — not to ask if I was alive, not to say she was sorry — but to complain that I had hurt your feelings by forgetting your birthday.” I let that sit in the cold air between us.

“That is who you all showed me you were.