Jacob went back in for her. That was what the report said, and it was what his captain Jim told me the next day in the kitchen of our house, sitting at the table where we had eaten dinner together every night for nine years, looking at me with the specific expression of a man who has delivered this kind of news before and has learned that there is no way to make it land more gently. Jacob had gone back in for Laura and he had gotten her out and he had not come out himself. The ceiling had given way in the stairwell on his way back down. It was fast, Jim said. He would not have felt much. I held onto that sentence for months, though I was never entirely sure whether it was true or whether it was something Jim said because it was the only thing available that might help.
Andrew was eight years old. He handled the loss in a way I have never been able to fully explain, with a quiet steadiness that seemed too old for him and that I understood, watching it, was the particular bravery of a child who has decided to hold himself together because someone else needs him to. He did not fall apart in front of me. He cried privately, I knew, because I would find his pillowcase damp in the mornings, but he was composed at the breakfast table and composed at school and composed at the funeral and composed in the weeks after, and I both loved him desperately for it and worried about the cost of it in a place I could not reach.
