It was about the arithmetic of luck.

Because when I looked, clear-eyed, at how Nora and I had survived, I could not escape the fact that so much of it had been chance.

We were lucky that my father had been the specific kind of careful man who left an encrypted drive and an unbreakable trust.

We were lucky that I happened to find an old phone in an attic.

We were lucky, above all, that on the one night we were finally brought into the light, the doctor on duty happened to be Ingrid Sato and not one of the hundred equally competent physicians who might have patched us up, believed the story about the stairs, and sent us home to die in a staged car accident three weeks later.