People wanted, afterward, to tell me it was a miracle that I lived — that God had a plan, that I had been spared for a reason, that there must be some purpose in my survival.

They meant it kindly, and I could not bear a word of it, because it made my staying home that morning into a meaningful thing, and it was not meaningful.

It was laundry.

It was a phone call I meant to make and never made.

If Adrian had said, that morning, ride with us, leave the wash, I would have gone, and I would be under the ground with them now, and there would have been just as much reason to it, which is to say none.

That is the thing that undoes you at three in the morning — not that they died, though that is a horror without a floor, but that they died and I did not for no reason at all, over a load of towels, over nothing.

A world that can take a seven-year-old and a four-year-old and their father off an ordinary road on an ordinary Tuesday, and leave their mother alive because of a chore, is a world without a scheme you can appeal to.

I stopped, very early, looking for the reason I was spared, because there wasn’t one, and pretending there was only made the ones who weren’t spared into a debt I could never repay.

I was not saved for a purpose.

I simply, by pure blind accident, stayed.

What I did with the staying — that part, and only that part, was ever going to be up to me.

Chapter 2 — Today Is Your Sister’s Birthday

I called my father first.

I don’t fully know why him; I think a child, even a grown one, reaches for a parent in the worst moment, on instinct, past all reason.