Four Words
The message was from 3:47 that afternoon, two hours and fifty-five minutes before kickoff, and it was four words long.
Can’t wait to see you.
That was all. No apology, no warning, no “there’s been a change.” Emma had answered it with a thumbs-up, and then, forty seconds later, a second message that I read with my hand over my mouth.
Dad, which gate? I’ll watch for you.
He hadn’t replied. The little gray word under it said Read 3:52 PM.
“I kept looking for him,” Emma said. “At the gate. I thought, he’s just late. I thought maybe he was parking.”
“Sweetheart.”
“He was already there, Mom. He’d read it. He was standing at the west gate with Harper’s flowers while I was texting him which gate.”
I turned the phone face down on the table. My hand was shaking, and I wanted her not to see it.
My name is Amanda Pruitt. I’m forty-three, a pediatric occupational therapist in Dayton, Ohio, which means I spend my days teaching small children to do hard things one inch at a time, and trying not to say “good job” when it isn’t one. I’m good at waiting while somebody figures it out. I wasn’t good at it that night.
David and I married in 2005, when we were both twenty-two. He was a sales rep for a medical-supply company, handsome in a slightly rumpled way, funny, with a laugh that made strangers turn around in restaurants. Emma was born in 2008, in a hospital in Kettering, after nineteen hours of labor and a doctor who said, at one point, “Mrs. Pruitt, I’d like you to stop apologizing to the nurses.” David cried so hard when he held her that a nurse had to take her back.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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