Six months later, I walk with a frame. I feel the floor. Seren is finishing nursing school. Lila attends a private academy—and still beats me at dominoes every night.

Yesterday, I asked her how she knew she could help me.

She shrugged.

“I didn’t fix you,” she said. “You were just frozen. Someone had to stay with you long enough for you to thaw.”

She was right.

Sometimes healing doesn’t begin in the body.
It begins when someone refuses to leave you alone in the cold.