It was saved by the simplest and most powerful thing in the world: a child who kept looking, and would not let go.

I try, now, to carry that lesson into the rest of my life, because it turned out to be about far more than one terrible night, and I do not want to have nearly lost my husband without learning the thing his near-loss had to teach.

The lesson is about closed questions, and the danger of them.

Because what happened in that room, the collective failure of a dozen intelligent, loving adults to see a living man in front of them, was not a failure of intelligence or of love.

It was a failure of attention, caused by a closed question.