I thought the worst day of my life was the day we buried Grace.

She was eleven.

The sky had been painfully blue, like the world hadn’t gotten the memo that mine had ended. I don’t remember much from that week except the weight of soil hitting wood and the way my husband, Neil, kept saying, “I’ll handle it.”

And he did.

He handled the hospital paperwork. The meetings. The forms I signed without really seeing. He told me she had been declared brain-dead after the infection spread. That there was no chance. No recovery.

I was drowning in grief. I couldn’t think, let alone question.

We had no other children. I told him once, through tears, that I couldn’t survive losing another. He held me and said it was over.

For two years, I lived like a ghost.

Then the phone rang.

We don’t use the landline anymore. The sound startled me so badly I nearly dropped the mug in my hand.

A man introduced himself as Frank, the principal of Grace’s former middle school.

“There’s a student here,” he said carefully, “who asked to call her mother. She gave us your name and this number.”

My stomach twisted.

“That’s impossible,” I said. “My daughter is dead.”

There was a pause. Paper shuffling.

“She says her name is Grace,” he replied. “And she looks very much like the photo we still have in our system.”

Before I could process that, I heard movement on his end.

Then a small, trembling voice.

“Mommy? Please come get me.”

The phone slipped from my hand.