I could panic — could spend my breath on fear, on the certainty that I was dying, on the animal urge to scream.

Or I could stay still and think.

I chose to think.

I kept the girl behind the engine block.

I talked to her, low and steady, told her help was coming, told her to breathe with me, and I counted my own breaths to keep them slow because I knew that a slow breath keeps you conscious and a fast one bleeds you out.

That was where I learned it, the thing that would carry me through every hard moment of the rest of my life, including a two-million-dollar party six years later: that panic is a luxury, that fear spends the oxygen you need to survive, and that the people who live through the worst things are usually not the strongest or the bravest but simply the ones who refused, in the crucial moment, to waste a single breath.