“‘This is Diana—our family dropout,’ my mother said for the fifteenth Thanksgiving in a row, but when my sister’s new husband reached across the table to shake my hand, his grip locked, his face went still, and the room forgot how to laugh before he said the two words nobody there was prepared to hear”

what his Thanksgiving silence had suggested: direct, economical, without pretense.

We talked about work in the oblique, careful way that people who hold clearances talk about work, in impressions rather than details, in the language of shared experience rather than shared specifics.

We understood each other without requiring explanation, and I had not continue reading …