My son called me at thirteen minutes past two in the morning and told me to hide, and I did, and I have spent the four years since making sure that neither of us ever has to again.

And on the ninth of September, which is my father’s birthday, I take a bottle of something down to the basement and sit on his drafting stool in the room my son built, and I say thank you out loud, to a man who has been dead for six years, for putting a door in a chimney void in 1999 because he could not stand to see a space go to waste.

He built it for drawings.

It held his daughter for four hours and twenty-one minutes, and it did not fail.