“There has been a horrible accident.”

“What happened, Hannah?” he asked, and even then, even in those first words, I could hear that half his attention was still on the party, that I had reached him in the middle of something he considered more important.

“Jonathan is dead,” I choked out, my throat closing around the words.

“Samuel and Charlotte are gone too.” And for a few seconds there was silence on his end — just the music thudding on, oblivious — while my father took in the sentence that had ended my world.

I waited, in that silence, for the sound of a father dropping everything.