She thought of her father that night as she lay in bed after Sunday’s dinner and too much wine. There had been a time—when she’d gotten pregnant young with Leda by accident—that being her father’s daughter had served her. Before Leda, she’d been living a nocturnal, artistic, selfish life, subsisting on candy and bagels. But when she and Matthew decided to keep the baby, her days began and ended with the sun; she ate sweet potatoes, spinach, and yogurt. Soon after giving birth, she found herself sitting in the back of a local café with a group of exhausted women at least a decade her senior, each with a baby strapped to her body. She listened while they talked about feeding and sleeping; she shared her specific, now-long-forgotten fears and questions, and everyone looked ravaged and terrified. And in that moment she most understood her father. Sarah’s mother died when Sarah was a baby. There was nothing her father could have done. And yet … and yet. She unfailingly described him as paranoid and would regularly recount his vigilant antics with wry, superior laughter, but while sitting in that café, she secretly began to believe that his ideas were not only sane but wise. So much of life is beyond our control. Shouldn’t we be doing everything we possibly can to stay safe? To keep on living?

Everyone was so vulnerable. You were a fool ever to relax.

Of course by that point her father was dead.

And then the playing and the homework and the meals and the friends and the going to other kids’ houses and the ordering socks and filling out forms and forgetting the bags and the checking where Leda was and the checking in and just checking in! The checking and checking and checking—through it all, she’d deferred to her father’s voice.

But now?

She thought of her father now, wondering if even he’d agree that maybe it was time for her to stop doing all she possibly could. That maybe—at least for Sarah—such vigilance was useless? Would she and Matthew go right to the edge of hope every time they received calls from an unknown number? She hoped so. She didn’t want to ever give up the anticipation. But it unnerved them every time.

Nothing she could do; this was all too clear. The phone calls and the waiting and the daily mental exertions—this had the same effect as doing nothing. She could ease up. She could let go. There were ways to learn. And there was freedom in that; wasn’t there?

She went to the pink bathroom and drank water straight from the tap, pressed her fingers to her eyelids, and walked down the stairs.