And then I turned off the alarm, and the machine that ran on me simply did not start, and I lay in the quiet with my daughter breathing against my side and discovered, with something like astonishment, that the world did not end.

Zachary’s shirt would be buttoned wrong.

Tristan would be late.

The breakfast would go unmade.

And all of it, every consequence, would land where it had always secretly belonged — on the people who had generated it — instead of on me.

It was the smallest act of rebellion imaginable, sleeping in.

It felt, that morning, like the first free breath I had drawn in half a decade.

And when Zachary came bursting through the door demanding to know why I hadn’t woken them, I understood that he was not really asking about the alarm.