At 11:30, the school called.
Emily had collapsed in class.
The hours after that exist in my memory only as fragments.
Driving.
The hospital.
Fluorescent lights.
The smell of disinfectant.
Waiting.
Then a doctor appeared.
Before he spoke, I knew.
There is a certain expression doctors wear when they are about to tell a parent something devastating.
Emily had been born with an undetected weakness in one of the blood vessels in her brain.
It had never appeared in routine screenings.
No one knew it existed.
For five years, it held.
That morning, it didn’t.
Emily died before I reached the hospital.
I never got to say goodbye.
That was the part that stayed with me most.
The last thing I had said to my five-year-old daughter was something ordinary about putting on her seat belt.
She rolled her eyes at me in that exaggerated way she had recently
