When the captain’s voice came over the speakers, I was lying on the floor of an airplane with my newborn daughter on a paramedic’s knees.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “there’s something important the mother needs to know before we open the doors.”

My whole body went cold.

The mother. That meant me.

I looked up at Ramon, the paramedic who had just delivered my baby on the floor of the rear galley. He was holding her in a pile of airline blankets, watching her chest go up and down, up and down, much too fast.

I grabbed his sleeve.

“What’s wrong with her?” I whispered. “Is there something wrong with her that you didn’t tell me?”

He didn’t answer right away.

And in that one second of silence, I was sure. I was absolutely sure that something terrible had happened to my daughter, and everyone on that plane knew it except me.

Five days earlier, my father collapsed while watering his tomatoes.

He was seventy-one years old. He’d been growing tomatoes in the same backyard in Mesa, Arizona, for forty years. Big, ugly heirloom ones, purple and yellow and striped. He talked to them. He named the best plants after baseball players. He claimed that was why they grew so well.

My sister, Rachel, found him lying in the dirt between the rows, with the hose still running.

She called me from the ambulance.

I was at home in Chicago, standing in our half-finished nursery, holding a can of paint. Pale green. I’d been trying to decide if it was too green.

“Hannah,” Rachel said. Her voice was very thin. “It’s Dad. It’s his heart. You need to come.”