Jenna and I talked every few days.

She was navigating her own version of the aftermath, her own reckoning about what her marriage looked like from new angles.

Baby Rose was home from the NICU by then, healthy and small and perfect.

And sometimes Jenna would send me a photo in the middle of a hard conversation, and I would just look at it for a while.

The thing about surviving something is that it doesn’t arrive with instructions.

No one hands you a schedule.

Week one, grief.

Week two, anger.

Week three, figuring out who you are outside of the thing that almost ended you.

It doesn’t work that way.

It all comes at the same time and in the wrong order and on completely random Tuesday afternoons.

I went back to work after 6 weeks.

My patients were glad to have me. My staff had managed beautifully in my absence, which was both gratifying and slightly humbling.

I walked through the door of the practice on my first morning back and stood in the reception area for a moment, looking at the walls I had chosen the paint for, the furniture I had picked, the logo I had designed with a freelancer at my kitchen table at 11:00 at night when I was 25 years old and terrified and completely certain I could build something.

I had built something.

Derek had tried to take it.

He had failed.

That felt worth noting.

Dr. Oay sent me a card.

He’d gotten my address through the hospital. With my permission, I had asked the staff to pass along my information if he wanted it.

The card was simple.

He wrote that he was glad I had recovered, that it had been his privilege to help, and that he hoped I was finding my footing again.

I wrote back.

We exchanged a few more letters over the following months. The kind of correspondence that comes from sharing the worst 40 minutes of someone’s life and coming out the other side.

He told me that he almost hadn’t taken that flight.

His original connection had been on time. A gate agent had rerouted him at the last minute due to overbooking.

I thought about that for a long time.

Derek was convicted 14 months after the hearing.

Attempted murder. Fraud. Forgery.

The prosecutor was thorough. The jury was out for less than a day.

He was sentenced to 22 years.

The judge cited the premeditation, the insurance policy, the deliberate use of a medical professional’s absence to avoid detection.

Sasha, who had known about the plan in a general way and had received money from our joint account, received a lesser charge and 18 months.

I heard later that she had tried to contact Derek after his conviction, and he had refused to see her.

I heard that with exactly as much sympathy as it deserved, which was none.

The night after the sentencing, I had Mara and my mother over for dinner.

I had moved into a new apartment six months prior, smaller than the house, in a neighborhood I had always liked and never lived in because Derek had wanted to be near his poker group.

I cooked badly, and they didn’t care.

We drank wine and talked about nothing important for most of the evening, and then talked about everything important for the rest of it.

“Are you happy?” Mara asked at some point. Late, the wine almost gone.

I thought about it honestly.

“I think I’m getting there,” I said. “Some days I’m just surviving. Some days I think I might actually be okay.”

“That counts,” my mother said.

I looked around the apartment.

My apartment. My name on the lease. My couch. My very ugly but beloved rug that Derek had always wanted to throw out.

“I think it counts a lot, actually.”

There are things I know now that I didn’t know before.

I know that love and familiarity are not the same thing, and I had confused them for years.

I know that the people who know you best are not always the ones you live with.

Sometimes they’re the ones calling from 100 miles away who hear something in your voice before you finish the sentence.

I know that building something is an act of faith, and that someone trying to take it from you does not undo the fact that you built it.

I know that a stranger’s rerouted flight can be the reason you’re alive.

I know that 31 is not too young to start over and not too old to understand why you should.

Last month, I visited Jenna and met Baby Rose in person for the first time.

She’s 4 months old now. She has Jenna’s nose and a look of tremendous seriousness that makes everyone who sees her laugh.

I held her for a long time while Jenna sat across from me drinking coffee, and we talked the way sisters talk when they have been through something together and separately and are still figuring out what the other side looks like.

Kevin was not there.

That is a longer story and one that belongs to Jenna.

On the drive home, I stopped at a coffee shop, a real one, the kind with exposed brick and too-loud music and baristas who take their oat milk ratios very seriously.

I ordered my usual.

I watched them make it.

I picked it up from the counter myself.

I drank it on the way to my car.

It tasted exactly right.

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