Then there was a phone call. Then a hospital. Then white corridors. Then a police officer with the face of a man who had said the same sentence many times and hated it every time. Then a word he heard and did not understand at first. Collision. Then another. Truck. Then drunk. Then everything began to sound as if someone had pushed his head underwater. He did not see her body right away. And that perhaps ruined him more. He spent hours suspended between hope and rot, one part of him knowing, another refusing to surrender. When they finally let him in, it was no longer the face he knew. It was there and not there. And that was when he understood that death is not simply absence. It is insult. It takes a person and leaves you something that resembles them just enough to break you. The child was lost with her. He learned that later, from a doctor who spoke as if he were announcing the weather. He did not remember the man’s face. Only his lips moving and the word sorry falling into the room like a rag.