I did not decide to stop feeling.

I simply found, when I reached for the horror and the heartbreak that should have been flooding me, that they had been set aside somewhere out of reach, put in a locked room to be dealt with later, because they were of no use to me now and would only get us killed.

There is a mercy in that, I think, though it is a terrible mercy.

When the worst thing is actually happening — not feared, not imagined, but happening, right now, to your child — the body does not always fall apart.

Sometimes it goes very quiet and very clear and very cold, and it starts, without asking your permission, to do the arithmetic of survival.

Mine did.

I lay on that tile with my heart trying to break my ribs, and behind my shut eyes a calm I did not recognize as my own began, methodically, to count.\n\nChapter 2 — What I Heard From the Floor

Christopher’s voice drifted back from the den, low, pitched for a phone and not for a room, and I lost some of the words and caught others, and the ones I caught rearranged my entire life in the space of a few seconds.

“They won’t be a problem after tonight,” he said.

A voice answered him, tinny and small, coming off the speaker of his phone.

“You’re sure everything’s handled on your end?”

“Yes.

It works fast.

They won’t be awake to notice a thing.” His tone was calm — that was the part that reached down into me and turned something to ice.