The principal called while I was standing at the sink, rinsing out Letty’s cereal bowl and trying, once again, not to look at the empty hook where Jonathan’s keys still should have been.

“Piper?” he said.

His voice was too tight.

My hand slipped. The bowl cracked against the sink.

“Is Letty okay?”

“She’s safe,” he said quickly. Too quickly. “But six men came into the office asking for her by name. My secretary thought we needed security.”

For a second, I couldn’t breathe.

Three months earlier, another careful male voice had called to tell me my husband was gone. Ever since then, fear had lived inside me like something permanent.

“Who are they?” I asked.

“They said they’re from Jonathan’s old plant. Letty heard his name and refused to leave the office. Piper, everyone’s upset. You need to come now.”

Then he hung up.

I stood there staring at the phone while water ran over my fingers and into the sink. Letty’s backpack was gone. Jonathan was dead. And grief had taught me one thing very well: it never waited politely.

The night before, I had found my daughter standing in the bathroom barefoot, holding kitchen scissors in one hand and a ribbon-tied bundle of hair in the other.

Her hair had been chopped to her shoulders, uneven and jagged, and her chin trembled when she looked at me.

“Letty…” I said carefully. “What did you do?”

“Don’t be mad.”

“I’m trying very hard to start somewhere before mad.”

That got the smallest breath of a laugh out of her, but her eyes filled anyway.

“There’s a girl in my class named Millie,” she said. “She’s in remission, but her hair still hasn’t grown back right. Today some boys laughed at her in science. She cried in the bathroom, Mom. I heard her.”

Then she lifted the ribboned ponytail.

“I looked it up. Real hair can go into wigs. Mine won’t be enough by itself, but maybe it can help.”

My throat tightened instantly.

Jonathan had lost his own hair in clumps on the pillowcase. Letty had watched all of it happen. She had never forgotten. Neither had I.

“I know it looks awful,” she muttered.

“Like you picked a fight with hedge clippers and barely survived,” I said.

She laughed once through tears.

“Was it stupid?”

I stepped forward, took the scissors from her hand, and pulled her into my arms.

“No,” I whispered. “Not even a little. Your dad would be so proud of you. I know I am.”

She cried against my shoulder, then leaned back and wiped at her face.