And when she saw them — Livia, stabilized and discharged into protective care, and Junia curled in the chair beside her — Pilar’s legs simply went out from under her.

She dropped to her knees on the industrial carpet and gathered both her daughters into her, and Livia wound her arms around her mother’s neck, and Junia pressed her face into her mother’s shoulder, and Pilar rocked them and said the same few words over and over, the way you do when they are the only words that are true: I’ve got you, I’ve got you, I’ve got you.

Cordell watched from the doorway, because someone had to be at the door and because he did not want to be closer than that to something so much like the center of the world.

He had seen a great many parents come through that station over the years, and he had learned to read the particular grief of the ones who arrived after the danger had already passed — the ones who had not been there.

There is a specific weight such a parent carries into the room, on top of the fear and the relief: the unbearable knowledge that the worst thing had come for their child while they were somewhere else, unable to stop it, and that the child had had to be saved by someone other than them.

Pilar carried it.