“Gramps set up that tree every year. He pulled out the decorations his dead wife and dead daughter bought and pretended to be a man who had lost too much and survived it. He pretended, for me, that his mind and his heart were not dark and convoluted places. He pretended that he lived in a house of me, his granddaughter, for whom he baked and often drove to school and taught important lessons about how to treat stains and save money, when really he lived in a secret room with the dead.”
