My phone rang at 2:17 p.m., the kind of weekday hour when nothing dramatic is supposed to happen.

I was sitting at my desk, pretending to be interested in a spreadsheet that had already been revised three times, watching the numbers blur into each other while the office carried on around me. Keyboards clicked. Someone laughed too loudly at something on a screen. The air conditioning hummed with the steady confidence of a building that assumed all emergencies could be handled politely.

Unknown number.

I stared at it until the second ring, and then the third, my thumb hovering like I could feel the future through the glass. I almost ignored it. Almost. The kind of almost that turns into an anchor in your stomach months later, when you’re awake at three in the morning replaying a decision you didn’t realize mattered.

I answered.

“Anna Walker?” a man asked.

“Yes.”

“This is Officer Miller. Your daughter, Lucy Walker, has been brought to Mercy General. She’s stable, but you need to come immediately.”

The word stable landed wrong, like the chair you sit in at a restaurant and it shifts underneath you, the moment when your body understands something before your mind catches up.