While stepping off a curb during her walk to work, she’d felt a sharp pain in her leg and heard a pop. As that leg had collapsed, she had tried to break her fall by planting the other leg, which had produced another pop, another lance of pain, and a full-body collapse into the gutter. It had rained the night before, the first really serious rain of the fall, and so she found herself sharing the gutter with a curiously Seattle medley of damp leaves, discarded coffee cups, and one used hypodermic syringe. A raven flew down out of a fir to see if she was edible yet. The only explanation she could think of was that some asshole had shot her a couple of times and then run away. But there were no holes, no bleeding.

Nothing happened for an amazingly long time. It was a mixed neighborhood of high-density housing and commercial buildings on the slope that joined the base of Capitol Hill to the shores of Lake Union. It ought to have been bustling. In a sense it was; cars whooshed by every few seconds, swinging wide to avoid the vaguely human-shaped blob that their infrared cameras had noticed in the gutter. In no time all of the cars had let each other know about said blob and rerouted traffic to mitigate the risk. The humans inside of them were, of course, otherwise occupied and so never looked up. The people in the apartment buildings, offices, and cafés were likewise paying no notice to goings-on in the gutter. Zula was left alone to ponder existential topics.

The tragedy—and the entire point—of being a parent was the moment when the story stopped being about you. It was prefigured and foreshadowed in the tear-jerking moments that parents captured in snapshots, and that advertisers looted for use in commercials: baby’s first steps, day one at kindergarten, riding a bicycle, soloing behind the wheel of a car. Zula and Csongor had been through all of those with Sophia, and had taken pictures and shed tears like everyone else. But the one that had really struck home had been when Sophia had gone off to college and blithely not communicated with them at all for three weeks. No text messages, no tweets, no phone calls: just a silence that might as well have been that of the grave. It wasn’t that she didn’t remember and love the family she had left behind. What she was doing at college was so fascinating that it simply didn’t occur to her to phone home. Csongor had suffered it in silence. Zula had reached out to her fellow bereaved: the mothers of Sophia’s school friends and soccer teammates. Some of them were still hearing from their kids several times a day, and tracking them on social media, but others were feeling what Zula felt: the sense of having been left behind, as if you were a character in a movie who gets run over by a bus at the end of the first reel, clearing the way for a younger, more charismatic star to act out the main story.