The call came on a Tuesday afternoon, while I was halfway through reconciling a vendor invoice at the office, and I knew from the first breath on the line that something was terribly wrong.

My daughter was crying, but it was not the loud, theatrical crying she used as a teenager when she lost a hair appointment. It was thin and broken, the sound of someone trying to speak through a closed throat.

“Mom, I need you.”

I stood up so fast my chair rolled into the filing cabinet behind me. “Sophie, where are you? What happened?”

“I’m at the hospital.”

“Were you in an accident?”

“No. It’s my heart.”

I want to explain what that word did to me, because everything that followed grew out of it. My husband Daniel died of a heart attack when he was forty eight years old. He went out to get the mail on an ordinary October morning, and I found him on the front walk with the envelopes scattered around him like leaves. Sophie was thirteen. She was the one who called the ambulance, because I could not make my hands work. In the eight years since, I had learned to live with most things, but I had never learned to hear that particular word without my own heart dropping into my stomach.

“What do you mean, your heart?” I said.

“They found something wrong. They say I need surgery, Mom. They said it could get worse if I wait.”

My daughter had played volleyball for four years in high school. She ran in the mornings and had never once complained of chest pain or dizziness. But I did not think about any of that in the moment. I thought of Daniel on the front walk, and I pressed my palm flat against my sternum as though I could hold something in place.