The first thing I did was get my mother out of the line of everything.

I took her gently by the arm and walked her back through the house to an interior bedroom, a room with no exterior door and no window onto the front, the safest place in the house, and I sat her down.

“I need you to stay in here,” I told her, keeping my voice low and even, the calm deliberately contagious.

“Close the door, and do not come out, no matter what you hear, until I come and get you myself.