“Did you cause it? Because you left Dad?”

The question went straight through every wall I’d built on the drive over.

“I left,” I said carefully, “because staying with someone who lies to you over and over would teach the three of you that love means putting up with being disrespected. And I am not going to teach you that.”

She leaned her head against my shoulder and was quiet for a while. Out the window, headlights swept across the ceiling in slow arcs, and a truck downshifted somewhere on the interstate, and I counted her breaths slowing until I thought she’d gone to sleep. “So what happens tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow, we figure out tomorrow. Nobody can rebuild a whole life in one scared night. We just have to get through this one. And we’re going to.”

Tomorrow, we figure out tomorrow. It came out of me as comfort, but it stuck, and it became the first rule of our new household — the thing I would say to her, and to myself, a hundred times over the months that followed, whenever the size of what we’d lost tried to swallow the small next step in front of us.