The phone call came while I was reheating soup in the kitchen. At first, all I heard was a calm police officer’s voice and an address repeated twice. I left the soup simmering on the stove and drove away without even turning the burner off.
When I arrived, blue emergency lights flashed across the rain-soaked street. Angie’s bicycle lay twisted beside the curb while her friends stood nearby, pale and shaking.
One boy kept repeating the same sentence over and over.
“We tried. We’re sorry… we tried.”
I collapsed to my knees as paramedics carried my daughter toward the ambulance. Some desperate part of me still believed that if I stayed close enough, the world might somehow change its mind.
The next day, her friends showed up at my door carrying flowers and swollen eyes from crying. I looked at them and realized they were the last people who had heard my daughter’s voice.
“Don’t come back,” I told them coldly. “You’ve already done enough.”
Deep down, I knew they didn’t deserve that.
