Chapter 1
Three days after we buried our daughter, I found five calls on her phone.
All of them had been made to my husband on the night she died.
He had answered two.
I stared at the call log, certain grief had made me misunderstand something.
10:43 p.m.
10:47 p.m.
10:51 p.m.—connected for twenty-two seconds.
10:58 p.m.
11:06 p.m.—connected for one minute and eight seconds.
Mark had told the police he had fallen asleep on the couch. He said his phone had been on silent. For three days, I had believed he never knew Emma needed him.
But he had spoken to her twice.
Upstairs, the shower was running.
I took screenshots of the call log and sent them to myself. I didn’t know why I did it secretly. Mark was my husband. We had been married for twenty-one years.
But grief had made strangers of us.
That morning, the police had returned Emma’s phone in a clear plastic bag. Gravel still clung to its daisy-covered case. Behind it was a photo strip of Emma and her best friend, Sophie, making faces at the mall.
Emma was smiling in the last picture.
Sixteen years old. One crooked front tooth. Her whole life waiting for her.
I touched her face with my thumb.
The dryer buzzed behind me.
Inside, tangled around one of Mark’s shirts, was Emma’s yellow hoodie. A pale brown stain remained near the cuff from the hot chocolate she had spilled the week before she died.
“Relax, Mom. It’s barely a spill.”
“You always say that when I’m the one cleaning it.”
She had rolled her eyes.
I pressed the hoodie to my face, desperate for the vanilla body spray she always wore too much of.
It smelled only of detergent.
I had washed away the last thing that smelled like my daughter.
My knees gave out. I sat on the laundry-room floor and held the hoodie against my chest, but no tears came.
People thought grief meant crying. They had watched me at the funeral, tissues ready, waiting for me to prove that I had loved her enough.
They didn’t understand.
Sometimes grief was discovering that your daughter’s clothes no longer smelled like her.
Sometimes it was remembering your last conversation.
Emma had called me twice on the afternoon of the party. The first time, she wanted to know where I had put her black sweater. The second time, we argued because I didn’t want her staying at Sophie’s if older boys were going to be there.
“Then I just won’t tell you next time,” she had snapped.
“Fine. Be cold, then.”
I had ended the call.
Those were the last words I could clearly remember saying to my child.
Now another question tore through me.
Why had she called Mark five times instead of calling me again?
I carried the hoodie and Emma’s phone into the kitchen.
Casseroles and pies covered the counters, each container labeled in my sister’s handwriting. People fed you after your child died because hunger was a problem they could solve.
Beside the sympathy cards, Mark’s iPad was charging.
The screen lit up.
A message notification appeared with one name above it.
Rachel.
I almost looked away.
Then I saw the message.
I keep replaying that night. I shouldn’t have asked you to stay.
I read it twice.
Rachel was Mark’s coworker. She was going through a bitter divorce, and for months Mark had talked about her as if she were a problem only he could solve.
“She doesn’t have anyone else,” he had told me once.
At the time, I had felt sorry for her.
Now I looked down at Emma’s call log.
Five calls.
Two conversations.
And while our daughter was trying to reach him, Rachel had asked my husband to stay.
I took a picture of the message with my phone and turned off the iPad screen.
The shower stopped upstairs.
A minute later, Mark came down wearing clean clothes. He had not shaved since the accident. His eyes were swollen, and his shoulders seemed permanently bent beneath a weight neither of us could carry.
When he saw Emma’s yellow hoodie in my hands, his face crumpled.
“I can’t look at that,” he whispered.
He turned away.
For one terrible second, I wanted to follow him. I wanted to hold him and believe we were still two parents trapped inside the same nightmare.
Then I remembered the two connected calls.
“Mark.”
He stopped.
“Did Emma call you that night?”
His back stiffened.
The pause lasted only a second, but after twenty-one years of marriage, I knew what it meant.
“I told you,” he said. “My phone was on silent.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
He slowly turned around.
I held his gaze while Emma’s phone seemed to burn in my hand.
“Did you speak to her?”
His mouth opened, but nothing came out.
That was answer enough.
I tightened my grip on our daughter’s hoodie.
“Where were you,” I asked, “the night Emma died?”