“You always were taller,” he said, and I laughed, wet.

We stood in the front room where our father had died and our mother had lived on without him and where, for two years, my brother had been both son and husband and nurse to a woman losing herself, and we let it be what it was, which was over.

I had dreaded the empty house more than any other part of it.

I had thought it would be the worst — a house stripped of everything that made it ours, the final erasure.