My mother died when I was sixteen. Her name was Helen. She died of a brain aneurysm on a Wednesday morning in October while she was making me coffee for the drive to school. I came downstairs. She was on the kitchen floor. She was gone before the paramedics got there. I do not like to write about it because there is no version of that morning that I have found, in eleven years, that does not break me open. I want to say it clearly: I was sixteen years old, and I was the person who found my mother, and the grief of that morning is the defining event of my life. My father was fifty-one. He grieved, visibly, for about

nine months. And then, seven months after my mother's death, a woman named Tanya from his accounting firm in Hartford started appearing at our house — "to help your father with casseroles," I was told at first. Within twelve months, Tanya was sleeping over. Within eighteen months, she had moved in. Within two years, my father had married her in a small courthouse ceremony that I attended, at sixteen and then seventeen, because my father had asked me to, and because I had not yet developed the emotional vocabulary to say no. I do not think my father did anything unforgivable. I think he did something that was humanly understandable, on a timeline that was, for a sixteen-year-old still sleeping in her mother's sweatshirt, extremely fast.