I stood at the rail as the interceptors pulled away with their cargo, and I watched the storm clouds tear open overhead to show a hard bright scatter of stars, and I breathed, and breathed, and could not stop breathing, as if I’d been underwater for eight months and had only now surfaced.

They had meant to make that ocean my grave.

Instead it became the water I finally washed them out of my life in.

The days right after were stranger than the night itself.

There is no manual for what a person does the morning after she was supposed to be dead.

I called my mother and father from the interceptor boat and we all three cried on a line that kept breaking up, and then I slept for eighteen hours, and then I woke up furious and grieving and relieved all at once, three feelings that don’t fit in a chest together and have to take turns.

I saw a therapist my father found, a quiet woman who specialized in people who’d survived the unsurvivable, and she told me something I’ve held onto: that the body keeps the score even when the mind decides to be strong, and that I should let myself fall apart in private as thoroughly as I’d held myself together on that deck.