“What happened to her?”

Richard did not come down off the porch.

He did not come down off it once, that whole terrible evening.

“She’s grounded,” he said.

“She’s unconscious, Richard.”

“Don’t be dramatic, Sarah.” He said it the way you’d correct a child yourself.

“She threw a tantrum because we confiscated her phone.

She’s fine.

She’ll snap out of it.”

My hands were shaking so hard I could barely make them work as I pulled out my own phone and dialed nine-one-one.

“Don’t make a scene,” Richard warned, and there was, under the annoyance, something else now — the first thin thread of wariness.

“She’s throwing a fit.

You’re overreacting, the way you always do.”

“How long,” I said, and I looked up at him from the wet ground, from beside our unconscious daughter, “has she been lying out here in the rain?”