I turned back to my daughter, and I took hold of the lace, and I pulled.

It gave way.

And under the high collar, under the careful layers of mortuary makeup meant to hide it, was the truth: a dark band of bruising across my daughter’s throat, and, near her collarbone, the small deliberate mark of a needle.

I did not need thirty years in an ER to read it, but the thirty years told me anyway, cold and certain.

This was not a heart that had failed.