My Husband Cooked Dinner, and Minutes After My Son and I Ate, We Both Collapsed. I Played Dead on the Floor and Heard Him on the Phone: “Soon They’ll Both Be Gone”

“What’s that?” the voice on the phone asked.

“It’s—” and for the first time all night his voice lost its terrible calm, cracked right down the center of it.

“It sounds like emergency vehicles.

Coming down the road.”

I opened my eyes.

I did not need the act anymore, and some deep exhausted part of me was glad to be done with it, glad to stop being a dead woman on a floor.

I pushed myself up, and across the tile Lucas was already sitting up beside his chair, staring at his father with a look I hope I never see on a child’s face again — terror and heartbreak and a kind of dawning, awful understanding, all at once.