Chapter 10 — The Third Stair

She fell in February.

Not down the basement stairs she feared — on the third stair from the top, the one that creaked, the one she’d warned me about my first day, carrying a basket of my folded laundry up to my room because she’d decided I worked too hard to do my own.

I was at the studio.

She lay on the landing for forty minutes, unable to get up, until I came home and found her — and I will carry the sound she made when she heard my key, the relief and the shame of it, for the rest of my life.

It was the shame that broke my heart, more than the fear.