I had made the calls the night before, once the house had gone quiet and Grace was asleep, once my father had finally cried himself out and my mother had put him to bed.

I had known, for years, roughly what I would need to do when the day came; Julian had told me, in the little time we had, the kind of people who would need to receive this, the kind of channels that would keep it from being quietly buried the way he feared it would be.

I had held those instructions in my memory for a decade like a prayer I was afraid to say out loud.

And now I was saying it.