The Crash

It happened on a normal afternoon drive.

I remember the sound first. Not the impact, but the silence right before it. Like the world paused to watch it happen.

We hit the guardrail, then the drop.

I woke up in the hospital with a broken shoulder and my daughter in a room down the hall.

They told me she survived when she shouldn’t have.

They called it a miracle.

The Recovery

At first, everything looked normal.

She spoke. She recognized me. She even smiled when I brought her a stuffed toy from home.

But then she started forgetting small things that she should not have forgotten.

My name.

Her favorite color.

How to hold a spoon.

She would just stare at me like she was trying to copy a face she once knew.

The Change

The first night she spoke in her sleep, I almost cried from relief.

Until I heard what she said.

"I was not the only one in the car."

I asked the doctors to run more scans.

They said there was nothing wrong.

But she keeps pointing at the empty corner of her room now.

And last night, she asked me a question she has never asked before.

"Which one of us survived?"