I did not scream.

I only bent over that bed and gathered her small still hand against my face and wept, and I stayed like that, clinging to her, until the black windows turned gray and the terrible long night at last let go into dawn.

Chapter 12 — Not That One

They came, after that.

Of course they came.

By mid-morning the house that had been so silent for so long was full of noise — the children arriving one after another, the shouting and the sudden weeping, the phone ringing and ringing, neighbors appearing at the door with covered dishes and careful faces.

There is a particular energy that fills a house in the hours after a death, a frantic busy motion, and I moved through it in a daze, hollowed out, doing what needed doing with my hands while the rest of me stayed back in that dark room where I had held her hand until dawn.