And then my mother’s, unmistakable: Just don’t forget my end of it.

I’m not lying in this bed all afternoon for nothing. On the bed, Marcia’s eyes snapped open.

The dying woman sat straight up, her exhaustion gone in an instant, staring at the phone in my hand with the color draining out of her face.

I made myself watch her, because I owed it to the frightened girl who had run through that building to see this all the way through.

It was not her fear I studied — it was the speed.