I thought of myself, that night three years ago, speeding the long distance nonstop, running into the hospital so frantic I forgot to close the driver’s side door, after a call that told me only that there had been “a serious accident.” I pictured his car accordioned against a tree. Studying the impassive faces directing me to the fifth floor, I found a detective named Pete Sunday who told me Belinda was in surgery. He told me what kind of surgery she was in, and my legs began to wobble. It was the kind of surgery that happened when you were a good girl and marked the organ-donor box... Then he led me to Stefan, in the hospital’s locked ward, chained to a bench behind a grill and sobbing, only half-conscious. His body was turned away from me, the pelt of dark hair at the back of his head matted with blood.

“He needs a doctor,” I said. “He’s bleeding.”

“It’s not his blood,” Pete Sunday told me.

I sat down, hard, on the floor. Stefan turned. He saw me. He didn’t know me.

Willing that vision to recede, I glanced at Stefan now and he turned to me as if I’d called his name. “What?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“I just heard you,” he said, and then added, “Is Dad scared about me coming home?”

“Sure. Scared, happy, confident, nervous.” Scared for you, or of you? I looked at the muscles bunched in Stefan’s forearms. My boy. My child. My only.

“It’s when people come out that they get in trouble. They realize that the whole world has passed them by. That’s why they end up back inside,” he said.

“But you’re not worried about that.”

“Committing a crime? No. Jeez. Does Dad think I can have a real life? Do you think I can have a real life? Do you think the whole world has passed me by?”