“‘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”

less precisely engineered than her usual register.

I noticed it.

The March lunch with Michelle had, in the week before it happened, a quality of anticipation I hadn’t experienced in relation to my family in a long time.

Not dread. I had become expert at managing dread over 15 years. Dread was familiar. Workable.

This was something different. A low-grade continue reading …