The thing about saving a life is that it does not feel like a rescue after the first week. It feels like a debt that comes due in small pieces for years.
In the spring after the trial, my mother got sick. It was not the same sickness as the first life, which had been a slow retreat from the world, but it was close. She had been holding herself together for a long time, longer than I had realized, and she had been holding herself together for a girl she did not fully understand. The newspapers had called our house. Neighbors had called our house. People from the fire department had come with casseroles and questions.
There is a kind of exhaustion that comes with being the family of a survivor. I had watched it in the first life, when Hannah came home with gray hair and a scar around her a
