I’d been in a chair near the door when the barrage had started. I’d put my bag on the floor next to me. I squatted on my haunches and shuffled forward. My fingers pressed against a damp, matted mess. It felt like a clump of rotting lettuce, but when I forced myself to delve more deeply I realized it was a book. The floor was thick with dead books, and I shuffled past them on legs that shook with grief as much as fatigue.

I found a damp, revolting mass of Styrofoam that might have been the chair cushions, and bits of the frame of the chair, but I didn’t come across my bag. However, in the middle of the room one of my clumsy hands closed on a piece of glass. It took several tries with the spatula to lift the shard from the floor and into the ladle and then into one of the plastic cups in my bag. Feeling around the area, I found bigger pieces: the neck of a bottle and a chunk that might have been part of the base. I collected these in my makeshift containers as well.

I had no way of photographing the spot where I’d found this evidence or labeling the evidence bags, which, anyway, weren’t certifiable as free from contamination. And while this evidence could never be used in court, it might tell me something helpful about the assailants.

I pushed myself to my feet. I was spasming up and down my body with fatigue. I longed to lie down where I was, on the pile of soggy books, and give way to exhaustion. I groped for a wall to steady myself. My mother’s face came to me, the day she came home from the doctor to tell me there was no hope, no treatment, no help, her dark eyes large against skin turned transparent and luminous with mortality.

“Victoria, my darling one. Grief and loss and death, they’re part of life on this planet. We all mourn, but it is selfish to turn mourning into a religion. You must promise me that you will embrace life, never turn your back on the world because of your private sorrow.”

My grief had come in the loud sobs of adolescence, and then in shouting matches with my dazed, helpless father.

“Your papà is not as strong as you and me, carissima. He needs your help, not your anger. Don’t turn against him now.”

The words had brought no comfort then and brought no comfort now. They were a burden, a load I had to carry, that of needing to be stronger than the strongest person near me. Sister Frances had died. I had to be strong enough to look after her in death since I’d been unable to look after her in life.