At 5 a.m., I got a call from my son-in-law: “Come pick up your daughter at the bus stop. We don’t want her anymore.” When I arrived, my daughter was barely breathing, covered in bruises and broken bones. She sobbed, “My husband and his mother…1

The words hit Margaret like physical blows. Say your goodbyes.

“Can I see her?”

“Briefly. She’s in the ICU.”

Margaret walked into the room. The machinery was deafening—a symphony of beeps and hisses keeping a corpse alive. Emily was unrecognizable beneath the tubes and bandages. She looked small. So incredibly small.

Margaret pulled a chair up to the bedside. She took Emily’s hand—the only part of her that wasn’t bandaged. It was cold.

“I remember when you were five,” Margaret whispered, stroking the pale skin. “You fell off the swing set and scraped your knee. You cried so hard. I put a band-aid on it and kissed it, and you asked for ice cream. And it was all better.”

She leaned her forehead against the metal rail of the bed.

“I can’t kiss this better, baby.”

She sat there for an hour, watching the heart rate monitor. Every beep was a second stolen from the reaper.