The Cloisters

by Katy Hays

The academic world, I knew, was small; full of friends and enemies, lightly smoldering conflicts that had been stoked by years of offhand remarks about one’s work, and sometimes, one’s character.

“So many of us here just wanted to spend our lives studying something. To be in libraries and classrooms, to be in archives and museums, to feel history through the things it left behind. But to do that is not to be with the living, Ann. You must remember that. And some of us survive all this death better than others.”

Moira was the kind of woman who not only slowed down to take in a tragedy but also spent the rest of the week researching it, learning about the victims, and internalizing their grief as her own.