Pull the your-father’s-health lever, and I would do anything at all to avoid being the daughter who hurt him.

For twenty-eight years, those levers had operated on me with the reliability of physics.

And now they simply did not.

My mother pulled them, one after another, in those frantic texts, with all her old force, and I felt nothing move.

It was the strangest sensation, like pushing on a door that has always swung open and finding it, for the first time, solid wall.

And I understood, in that moment, what had changed.