It didn’t come, or not the way I’d braced for.

What came instead was clarity, cold and settled and almost calm.

I knew exactly what I was going to say to my brother, and exactly what I was not going to do, which was scream, or beg, or give him the scene he might have used to make himself the wounded party.

Mama had spent twenty years refusing to give those men a scene.

The least I could do was finish it the way she’d fought it: quietly, with the papers in my hand.