“When they first learned her diagnosis, the sisters had cried over it together. Sam felt shattered. That was back when she pictured pain as something swift and final. She understood better, now, what it actually was – not a glass dropped onto a tile floor, one terrible burst, but a tree required to grow over years in a space that limited it. Branches curled in on themselves, leaves dropping. A living thing that was forced, relentlessly, to submit. That was how sorrow acted on them.”
