I wipe her tears away with my sleeve, their familiar, humid salt hitting my nose, and then—I remember Tai crying while I picked through our father’s brittle bones last summer. I guess grief is like that: the banshee patiently waiting in the many-halled house of your mind, so quiet in certain moments, until you turn a corner and see how it takes up rooms and rooms, cracking their floors and windows with its volume, its weight.

At the private family ceremony, Tai sobbed in thick, heaving sighs, for once in her life giving herself up to being unappealing, with her nose running, her eyes running, and her mouth running: “I’m so sorry. I promise this is my last night of crying,” she said each night, in between blowing her nose on a rough paper napkin she found in her purse. “No one wants to be around a sobber.”

“No one’s watching us, Tai,” I replied, even though my head felt heavy and swollen, and even touching the fringes of reality in my thoughts was painful.

When the crematorium expert spoke, Tai listened, heaving with uneven breaths in the forest-green robe-dress that belonged to Mama. It was that humid kind of August heat that makes even existing tiring, but the crematorium was frigid. We passed each delicate fragment of Dad between us with our fingers until each one—some small as a man’s thumbnail—reached its final resting place inside a cinerary urn he had chosen himself. She held my sweating left hand so tight the whole time that I got bruises on the edges of my fingers. But I didn’t notice until later, because all I wanted to do was help her stop shaking: I could feel it, down to her very core, this recognition that her dad was gone, as I handed the bones with my right hand to Teddy and Marion.

It helps me, and it has always helped me, to pretend she needs help only I can give.

At the funeral feast, we stared at the platters of smoked scallops and seared lamb, too heavy and rich for my grief-weak stomach, and I cut up piles and piles of scallops for her to eat. But back at the hotel, Tai plopped herself in front of the smart TV to watch endless episodes of The Office with Viloki mulberry twists dropped into ice cream and a virtual IV of meme accounts on Instagram. So I just drifted, taking hot bath after hot bath, then staring at the faded gray wood of the hotel desk and its comically tiny hydroponic herb garden for hours in my hotel robe.

That was when it hit me, that I had lost a biological parent beyond a shadow of a doubt. The certainty was somehow both cruel and just.

“At least we still have Mama,” Tai whispered to me that night, loose-mouthed on the verge of sleep.