She couldn’t talk at all, at first, when her mother came rushing through Mrs. Carmichael’s front door.

There is no proper term, no single word, for the tidal wave of emotion on the far side of a near miss. It’s made of a fear that’s completely after-the-fact. There’s nothing to fix. Everything is fine except the trembling and the terror spiked with fury at the carelessness of the universe. It’s resentment shot through with bright pangs of superstitious gratitude toward whatever Power intervened to make it a horribly lucky day. It’s love concentrated to a strength that’s nearly poisonous.

The worst of it, though, is the gift of preview—that cold ghost of grief that whispers that it is still out there for you, simply waiting for some other day.

Carly and her mother shared all of it in an unbroken look as they scrambled past the small crowd of policemen and Mrs. Carmichael’s barking dog to get to each other. Her mother grabbed her up, trying to hold her, stroke her, and look into her eyes all at once. Carly couldn’t breathe, pinned by the desperation on her mother’s face to be sure, all the way through, that she was okay. They told each other in sobs and nods. She was fine. They would all be fine.

But the clutching quickly lost its practical power. Muscles relented. Breath slowed. Mrs. Carmichael’s grandfather clock clucked its second hand at them, and everyone else ran out of places to look to give them the privacy of their reunion.

Carly turned back to the police.

The story was her job right now. Their expectant looks gently reminded her of it, so she went back to work. They seemed happy enough with what she told them, fired up even. They always smiled at the part where she knocked him down, however it had happened.

But her recollections became more frustrating to her as what happened became a script instead of an actual memory. The whole narrative took on the order of recitation, and she lost the reality of where she’d stood, what he’d said, why she had bolted inside the house instead of out into the street for help, what he’d done, what she’d done, how she’d made it back to the door and beyond. The details of it receded as the tale of it bloomed. She was the foremost authority on the subject, and she wasn’t sure she believed any of it.

They took a break to move the whole circus back to the Liddell house. From the porch Mrs. Carmichael watched them leave. Carly looked back and tried to let her know with the right-temperature smile and steady eyes that she understood what had passed between them.