“‘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”

experienced that in a family context before.

At some point, he said, “For what it’s worth, I should have found a way to reach you after the Syria package, even just to say the work mattered.”

“You couldn’t have known who I was,” I said.

“No,” he said. “But still.”

Cassidy watched us from across the table with the expression of someone watching two people continue reading …