

She was making tea when it happened. The ding-dong of the doorbell jarring her from her thoughts, the creak of the heavy wooden door, the rustle-swoosh of envelopes passed from hand to hand, the hissss of hot water into her mug, the beeeep beeeep of the timer.
She had the timer in her hand when she slit open that first letter: the letter that changed her life. The timer was still in her hand when she read those first words, all clinical precision and cold steel in her head. The timer was spinning out of her hand when the fact sunk in, the fact that her baby sister was dead. And the timer was cracking on the cold tile floor when she sank to the ground.
She stared blankly at the fracture in the timer's plastic screen, stared blankly at the numbers frozen at 00:17. She stared through a shimmering curtain of tears as a fracture split open in her heart, a fracture that grew ever wider until she could no longer bridge the chasm between before and after. And she was still staring into space when the whisper drifted across the void in her aching chest; it was okay to cry.