My father died because of me — because I was impatient, because I ran into the street, because I could not wait thirty seconds for the light.

That single word had shaped everything about who I became.

It is why, I think, I had grown into a person who could not quite let herself be happy, who kept the world at a slight remove, who married a good man and lived in a beautiful house and still felt, always, that she did not deserve any of it — because underneath it all was a ten-year-old girl who believed she had killed her father, and that a girl like that had no right to a good life.

And my mother, on that curb, changed the word.