She was fifty-nine when her daughter died.

She had retired at fifty-four with a pension that was calculated for one person, and she was sixty-two by the time it was finished, and she had spent a considerable portion of what she had.

And underneath all of the paperwork there was the actual thing, which nobody in any of those buildings ever asked her about, which was that a fifty-nine-year-old widow was now raising a seven-year-old.

Margaret had raised one child, thirty years earlier, with a husband and a mortgage and a body that could do a twelve-hour shift and then a load of laundry.

Now she was doing it alone, in a two-bedroom house in Escondido with a step down into the den that she had been meaning to fix since 2009, and she was tired in a way she had never been tired in an emergency department, because in an emergency department the shift ends.

The first year was the worst and it was not the grief that made it so.