We would survive.
**Part Two: The Woman with the Folder**
Grief moves strangely in a large family. It doesn’t travel in a straight line—it bounces, passing from person to person at unpredictable angles, reaching different people with varying intensity at different times. Tommy wept immediately and loudly, and then, two days later, he seemed almost fine, which frightened me more than the crying. Phoebe moved around during the first week with a kind of rigid, brittle composure that I recognized as what she did when she was holding too much in. Lila grieved in waves, without warning, sometimes in the middle of conversations about completely unrelated things. Adam became quiet in a way that was completely unlike him. Ethan cleaned things, obsessively, silently, for three days straight. Sybil was angry at everyone and everything and couldn’t quite explain why, but I understood: anger was easier to bear than grief, at least in my opinion.
