Wendy’s voice went muffled and far away, like I was underwater and she was shouting at somebody on a dock.

Chloe’s mouth was open.

She was twenty-four years old and she was holding a motel sheet against her chest and looking at me with an expression I can only describe as a child who has been caught.

Wendy was two feet from her with her back turned.

She was going to turn around.

She was mid-sentence, and she was going to run out of air, and she was going to turn around and look at the bed, and she was going to see her brother’s daughter.

And I thought — and I want to be honest, this was not noble, this was not calculation, this was pure animal arithmetic that took less than a second — her pressure runs at 160 and we are twenty-five minutes from a hospital and I have driven her to nine cardiology appointments.