My throat tightened as I asked, “What happened,” and the pause on the other end told me everything she could not say outright.
“She is stable for now,” the woman replied carefully. “But she has sustained serious injuries.”
I do not remember hanging up the phone, and I do not remember deciding to drive faster than I ever had before, because my body moved on instinct alone, gripped by a fear that no financial risk or professional failure had ever come close to matching.
My daughter, Grace, was nine years old, small for her age, quiet in ways that people often mistook for politeness, and she had already lost more in her short life than any child should have to carry, yet I had convinced myself she was resilient enough to endure whatever adjustments adulthood required of her.
That belief would haunt me forever.
Grace had been six when her mother died, after a sickness that drained the warmth from our home long before it took her life, and in the aftermath I did what I had always done best, which was organize, plan, and move forward with a sense of purpose that masked grief rather than healing it.