The first months were a kind of beautiful disaster.

Five children carrying a grief too big for their bodies, in a house that was still learning to be a home.

There were night terrors — real ones, the kind where a small child sits up screaming at two in the morning and doesn’t know you yet, and you learn to just be a calm shape in the dark until it passes.

There were the questions, the ones that stop your heart in the doorway: is our mom in heaven? did the fire hurt? are you going to die too? I learned to answer them honestly and low and without flinching, because I’d needed someone to do that for me once and no one had.