I rested my head back against the bench that a good man had built for me, and I closed my eyes, and at long last, I allowed myself to rest.

I have thought since about why it was the coffee cup, of all the objects in that house, that I was finally able to move that night, and I think it is because the confrontation at the door had shown me, at last, the difference between honoring the dead and being imprisoned by their absence.

For six months I had kept the house exactly as they left it — the cup, the jacket, the sideways sneakers — and I had believed, in my grief, that keeping it that way was how I stayed loyal to them, how I refused to let them go.

But standing in that kitchen, after I had turned my back on the people who valued my children’s deaths only as a sum of money, I understood that I had been confusing two very different things.