Chapter 1

The second time my son begged me to look after his daughter, I remembered dying.

Not a dream of dying. The actual business of it: my heart contracting around a pain that would not release, my phone lighting up on the floor, strangers still telling me what a monster I was while I tried to draw one more breath.

Now the phone was in my hand. My heart was beating. Daniel was talking.

“Mom, please. Anna's taking the college rejections hard. Rachel's gone, and I haven't even found a way to tell her. I'm out of town dealing with everything. I need someone there.”

Exactly the same words.

I put my free hand against my chest.

In the life I remembered, I had packed a bag and gone to his apartment. I had quarreled with my granddaughter. I had stepped out to cool off.

By the time I came back, she was dead.

Daniel arrived almost immediately. He knelt beside her, looked up at me, and began to scream.

You hated her. You finally got what you wanted.

Someone filmed him. Someone found an old photograph of me wearing diamonds. Within days, I was the rich grandmother who had bullied a grieving teenager to death.

No explanation could travel as far as that image.

“Find someone else,” I said.

“Mom.”

“I'm sixty-four. I'm not equipped for this.”

“It's two days. She's your granddaughter.”

I ended the call.

My living room was as it had been that morning: a cup of coffee on the side table, an open book, sunlight falling across the rug. On the wall, the clock continued its small, indifferent work.

I checked the date three times.

Then Daniel called again.

“She's all I have left,” he said. His voice broke in precisely the place I remembered. “I've lost my wife. Don't make me lose my little girl too.”

I should have asked why he could not come home himself. I should have asked a great many things.

Instead, I thought of Anna at eighteen, forever eighteen, with people arguing over the reason she had died.

If I had been given this day again, perhaps I could get her through it.

“Two days,” I said.

Daniel exhaled. “Thank you. Thank you, Mom.”

He sounded relieved.

An hour later, I stood outside his high-rise apartment in Bellhaven with a small suitcase and a pulse that would not settle. The elevator doors closed behind me. At the end of the corridor, a window caught the Texas afternoon in a hard white square.

Anna opened the door before I could ring twice.

Her eyes were swollen. That was familiar. The way she stared at me was not.

She looked at my face, my hands, the suitcase. Then she reached toward my sleeve and stopped herself.

“Grandma?”

“Your father asked me to stay.”

I had never been gifted at comforting people. Still, I remembered what my indifference had supposedly done, and made an effort.

“Those rejection letters aren't a verdict on your life. You can take a year. Apply again. There are worse things than a delay.”

Her mouth trembled.

Excellent. I had been in the apartment for less than a minute and had apparently made her cry harder.

I brought my suitcase inside.

“We can talk about it after you've eaten.”

She shut the door but stayed beside it, watching me with something closer to horror than embarrassment.

“Why did you come back?” she whispered.