I felt the room behind me—the blankets, the cocoa, the kids building a cracker city, the nurses sorting pills onto a music stand. I felt June at my shoulder, and Luke just inside the doorway, towel over his hands, eyes steady. I put the deputy star sticker Zoe had given me in my pocket so I wouldn’t fidget it to death, and I stepped into the slice of gray that might be morning.
“Nobody authorized us,” I said, voice carrying the way the mail truck horn does when I wave at kids on a sunny day. “The river did. The clock did. Our neighbors did.”
Pens paused. A mic edged closer.
“We didn’t save a bus,” I went on. “We moved kids. Addison with the dinosaur backpack. Kayla with the braids. May whose shoes squeaked in the rain. Eli who doesn’t say much when the world is loud. Liam who needed the knit cap and quiet. Zoe who was brave the way leadership is brave—calm, steady, counting when the rest of us forgot how.”
