One boy kept saying, "We tried. We're sorry... we tried."
I got out of the car and dropped to my knees as they carried my daughter toward the ambulance. Some part of me still believed that if I stayed close enough, the world might change its mind.
The next day, her friends came with flowers and swollen eyes, and I looked at them and saw the last people who had heard my daughter's voice.
"Don't come back," I told them. "You've already done everything you could."
Some buried part of me knew they did not deserve that. But I shut the door in their faces, not knowing my daughter had already left them one final job to finish.
"We tried. We're sorry... we tried."
Before we moved to this town, Angie had been quiet in the sweetest way. She left sticky notes on the fridge, sat on the bathroom counter while I got ready for work just to talk, and once cried over a bird with an injured wing and insisted we stay up searching how to help it.
She felt like my daughter and my best friend folded into one person.
Then I got transferred.
We moved, and Angie lost everything familiar in one summer. Loneliness has a way of making even good girls lean toward the first group willing to say, "Come with us."
Her new friends were not bad kids, just restless ones drawn to abandoned places and the thrill of doing something a little reckless. A few times they got stopped for exploring old buildings, nothing serious.
She started spending more time with her friends, and after Angie was gone, I couldn't stop wondering whether one different friend might have changed what happened that day.
Her new friends were not bad kids, just restless ones drawn to abandoned places.
Two days later, I buried my only child. I kept looking at the church doors without meaning to, waiting for Angie to come rushing in late and laughing.
Her friends did not come, and I hated them for that.
