At family dinners there, he would mistily say her grace: “Thank you for the things we eat. But that prayer started coming back to me, a ghost whispering in my ear, trying to make me say thank you. At the beginning of March, we went back to the house as a family for the first time. One of my friends moved back into her fire-damaged house as soon as the evacuation order lifted: single mom, two kids, no choice. In the first three months, my family moved ten times, from hotel to hotel to Airbnb.