Rowan

Dad had been in Mom’s room with the door closed for two days. Gretchen, Georgia, and Vicky had busied themselves with making food and tending to the house, carrying trays of tea and snacks upstairs on a regular basis, the trays untouched as they rested on the carpeted floor until they were eventually cleared away by Gretchen.

Despite the amount of people in the house, it was dead silent. Every once in a while, someone started the washing machine in the ...