I stepped in, and I pressed the button for the basement, and I began to descend.

I want to tell you what those few seconds in the elevator were like, because they were, in their way, the center of my whole life, the hinge on which everything before turned into everything after.

I believed, going down, that I was descending to look at the body of my own daughter.

I believed I was about to have the single worst moment a human being can have, and I was steeling myself to survive it, gathering what was left of me around a core of pure, animal, maternal will, the way you brace before a blow you cannot avoid.

And underneath the terror, strangely, there was a stillness — the specific, terrible stillness of a mother who has decided that whatever waited for her below, she was going to look at it with her eyes open, and that she was not going to let anyone, not Luke, not his mother, not his money, close the lid on the truth of what had happened to a child.

I did not yet know how much larger that resolve was about to become.