If only I’d looked up from the kitchen just once. If only I’d trusted the knot in my stomach instead of convincing myself I was overreacting.***
People always say regret comes afterward. They’re wrong. Sometimes it arrives before anything happens at all, quietly begging you to pay attention. I just didn’t listen.
My daughter Stasy was 14 that summer.
Old enough to want independence.
Yet, young enough that I still counted the minutes whenever she left the house.
She liked to remind me that none of her friends had parents who worried as much as I did.
She wasn’t entirely wrong. I’d always been protective, maybe too protective.
When she was little, I’d stand at the end of the driveway until her school bus disappeared around the corner.
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