I called my grandmother Thursday evening, curled up on my couch with Meatball’s giant head in my lap. She’d been having a good week—her speech therapy was progressing better than the doctors had anticipated, which I took as a positive sign.
“You sound distracted, baby girl,” she said. “What’s on your mind?”
“Nothing. Work stuff.”
“Mmhmm.” That tone again, the one that meant she wasn’t buying what I was selling. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with that boy, would it? The one you said bought your newspaper?”
“He didn’t buy it for me.”
“I didn’t say he did.”
I scratched behind Meatball’s ears. He made a sound of pure contentment. “We are currently not even on speaking terms.”
“And how does that make you feel?”
“Fine. It’s fine. It’s what I wanted.”
She was quiet for a long moment. I could picture her in her hospital bed, wearing her favorite cardigan, giving me that look she’d given me my whole life—the one that said she loved me too much to let me lie to myself.
“Baby girl,” she said gently. “It’s been seven years. Don’t you ever get tired of running?”
Friday evening, the newsroom emptied around me, colleagues drifting out in pairs and clusters, until I was alone with my laptop and a story that refused to cooperate.
I rubbed my eyes and checked the time—nearly nine o’clock. The cleaning crew had already come and gone. The building had that hollow feeling it got after hours, all empty hallways and humming machines.
I saved my work and started gathering my things. Enough. I could finish this at home, away from this building and everything it reminded me of.
That’s when the lights went out.
No warning. No flicker. One second I was reaching for my bag, the newsroom bright and familiar around me. The next, absolute darkness swallowed everything.
I froze. The silence was immediate and complete—no hum of computers, no whir of the air conditioning, nothing except my own breathing, suddenly loud in my ears.
I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. Couldn’t see the desk I’d been standing next to.
I couldn’t see anything at all.
My heart started pounding.
It’s just a power outage. The backup generator will kick in any second. Just wait.
I counted to ten. To twenty. To thirty.
Nothing happened. The darkness pressed against me, thick and heavy, like something with weight and intention.
I fumbled for my phone, my hands shaking so badly I nearly dropped it twice before I managed to turn on the flashlight. The thin beam cut through the black, but instead of helping, it made everything worse—shadows jumping at the edges, familiar shapes twisted into something threatening.
The desks looked wrong. The walls seemed closer. The ceiling felt like it was pressing down.
I hated the dark. I had always hated it since I was eight years old.
It came back the way it always did—not as a memory but as a sensation. The smell first.
Antiseptic and floor cleaner and something underneath both that I would later learn was grief, though I didn’t have the word for it then. I was eight, and I was sitting in a plastic chair in a hospital corridor, and the chair was too big for me, my feet didn’t touch the ground, and no one had told me anything.
Adults moved past in soft shoes, speaking in voices they thought I couldn’t hear.
Both of them. The impact alone.
