Chapter 1 — An Empty Room

I woke up after heart surgery to an empty hospital room, and when I asked the nurse where my children were, she hesitated before she answered.

“They were here while you were in surgery, Mrs.

Brennan,” she said.

I turned my head, slowly, because turning my head still cost me something, and I looked at the three empty chairs lined up beside my bed.

Three chairs.

One for each of my children, pulled close to where I would wake, exactly as they should have been.

And every one of them empty.

“Then where are they now?” I asked.

The nurse’s eyes dropped to the tablet in her hands, and she did not want to say it, I could see that, and some part of me went cold before she ever spoke, because a nurse who does not want to tell you where your children are is telling you something already.

“They left,” she said, “about an hour ago.” The anesthesia still sat heavy in my head, and my throat was raw and scraped from the tube they’d had down it, but those three words cut through all of it and left me perfectly, terribly clear.

Chapter 2 — Too Expensive

“Why?” I asked.

She looked as though she would rather have been anywhere else.

“They said,” she told me, carefully, “that the parking was getting too expensive.” For a few seconds I was certain I had misheard her — that the anesthesia had scrambled the words on their way into my ears.

I had just had my chest opened.

My heart, the actual muscle of it, had been operated on that morning, and I had gone under not knowing for certain that I would come back up, the way you do at sixty-four with a bad heart.

And my three children — Trent, who had promised to leave his accounting office for the whole day; Bianca, who had promised to bring flowers; Wade, who had promised to come by after his sales calls — my three children had sat in those chairs while I was unconscious, and then they had gotten up and left, all three of them, before I woke, because the parking was getting too expensive.