Chapter 1 — Ash on My Hands

When I called my parents from the hospital chapel, my hands were still streaked with ash from the accident scene.

That morning, my husband, Adrian, had been driving our two children south along Interstate 95, outside Richmond.

Maya was seven.

Rowan was four.

It was an ordinary morning.

There is no other kind, until one of them isn’t.

A truck driver a dozen miles up the highway had been awake for too many hours, and somewhere outside the city his eyes closed, and his rig drifted across the median, and it came into the oncoming lanes before my husband had any chance at all to move out of its path.

All three of them were gone before the first siren reached them.

I was not in the car.

I have turned that fact over ten thousand times since, in the dark, at three in the morning, and I have never once been able to make it lie flat.

I was alive for the smallest of reasons — I had stayed home that morning, over nothing, over a load of laundry and a phone call I meant to make.

My whole family drove off down an ordinary road, and I stayed behind, and that arbitrary, meaningless choice is the reason I am here to tell you any of this.

I did not feel spared.

I want to be clear about that.

In the chapel, with the ash still on my hands, I did not feel like the lucky one.

I felt like the one who had been left behind on the shore while the tide took everything.

There is a particular cruelty in the arbitrariness of it that no one who has not lived it can quite understand.