She broke then, sobbing, and out of the sobbing came the thing she’d clearly been carrying for years.

“You always do this,” she cried.

“You always talk to me like you’re better than me.”

It left me speechless.

Fresh out of a coffin, across a metal table from the sister who’d helped put me in it, and the wound she needed to press was still my tone of voice.

But underneath it, when I made myself ask the real questions quietly, the truer and sadder thing came out.

She and Christopher had been talking — really talking — for almost two years.