It was being buried alive in a body that had become a locked room.

I could hear everything — the monitor, the vent, my family discussing my death over my chest — and I could do nothing, could not so much as widen my eyes or turn my head or make a sound to tell the one kind nurse in the building that the man holding my hand had paid to put me here.

The finger took hours.

Not because the distance was far but because the line between my will and my hand had been cut somewhere in the crash, and I had to lay a new one down thought by thought, the way you’d rebuild a severed cable strand by strand in the dark.

I would send the command — move — and nothing would happen, and I would send it again, and again, a thousand times, refusing to let myself believe that nothing was the permanent answer.

When the fingertip finally brushed the sheet, it was the single hardest thing I had ever done, harder than building the company, harder than any deadline or negotiation, because every other hard thing in my life I had done with a body that obeyed me.