Fine.

Drive properly, don’t get stopped.”

Maya lay in the dark with her eyes open.

Later she would try to describe what happened in her chest in that moment and would never find the right words for it, because it was not grief and it was not even fear.

It was subtraction.

In the space of eleven seconds she went from a woman with a family — a difficult husband, a warm mother-in-law, a life with problems in it — to a woman with nothing at all, and the strange part, the part nobody believed, was that under the horror there was a thin bright thread of relief.

Because it had never been in her head.