Chapter 8 — The Headline

Then, on a frozen Tuesday morning in January, my full name appeared across the front page of the regional newspaper.

WIDOW OF ROUTE 66 TRAGEDY AWARDED $18.7 MILLION SETTLEMENT; CREATES CHILD SAFETY FOUNDATION.

I sat at my kitchen table with the paper spread in front of me, and I read my own name, and my children’s tragedy, rendered into the flat public language of a headline, and I felt a strange and complicated thing.

Because the money was, in one sense, obscene.