Every Time My Daughter Came Home Unresponsive, My Husband Told Me Not to Worry. The Recording in Her Backpack Revealed Why.

I told her I didn’t know yet.

She looked down at her shoes and said she missed the little window above her bed.

I felt a pinch of grief for all the ordinary things she’d lost: the marks on the doorframe where we’d measured her height, the school drawings on the refrigerator, the sidewalk where she’d learned to ride her bicycle.

“We can miss a place and still decide it’s better not to live there,” I said.

She considered that.