It isn’t dramatic.
There’s no ambulance.
No screaming.
No blood.
No headline.
But it’s the first time in years that I feel the old adrenaline spike.
And it comes from something so ordinary it almost feels unfair.
Eleanor is three and a half when she decides that gravity is optional.
Marcus is in the garden, trimming hedges in the careful, deliberate way he approaches anything sharp. I’m inside, half-reading a student draft while stirring something on the stove.
Zara is in the living room, laptop open, earbuds in, sketching between emails.
The house is humming with its usual steadiness.
And then—
The thud.
It’s not loud.
It’s not catastrophic.
But it’s wrong.
Every nerve in my body knows it before my mind does.
“Eleanor?” I call.
No answer.
I’m already moving.
By the tim
