I’ve got you.

We’re going home.”

I want to stay in that moment a little, because it is the one I choose to keep out of that whole day, the one I take out and hold when the others crowd in.

My daughter, alive, in my arms.

The specific weight of her, which I had carried a thousand times — to bed when she fell asleep in the car, up onto my shoulders at parades, into the house when she was small and would not walk when she could be carried — that exact familiar weight, real and warm and breathing against me.

For three days I had not known if I would ever feel it again.