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”

That was the hardest thing.

I need to say it plainly, because everything else that night — the freezer bag, the phone call, the headlights, all of it — was easier than that one moment, and nothing else came close.

To lie on a kitchen floor and hear a man crouch over your ten-year-old son and speak to him in a gentle voice, the same gentle voice he had used to read that boy bedtime stories, the same voice that had told him he was proud of him at his last science fair — to hear that voice tell your child that this would be easier for everybody, and to not move.

To hold your body slack and your breathing slow while every animal instinct you have ever possessed screams at you to rise up off that floor and put yourself between them, to claw, to scream, to fight.