The most painful day of his life started as perfect as any other. Your only child, now 14, was still at a friend's house after a sleepover, and you two were still basking in the afterglow of last night's wine-fuelled fun - it wasn't often you both got the house to yourselves. You took full advantage. The sheets were still rumpled and half falling off the mattress as you lay tangled and lip-locked, just getting ready for another round to continue the night of perfection, when his phone rang on the nightstand. He almost didn't answer it - didn't want to, not when he finally had you to himself for once. You had to convince him to pick the phone up, just in case it was your child needing something. It was worse.

He tried not to panic in front of you when he hung up the phone and bolted out of bed to grab clothes and his keys, tossing you your discarded clothing as he babbled some incoherent explanation that you could barely understand. There was a car, your child was going to get breakfast with some friends, whoever was behind the wheel wasn't paying attention.

You'd never seen him drive so fast, so recklessly; he'd always driven so damn carefully when his family was the cargo, but he needed to get to the scene, needed to see that his little one was alright. They must be scared, in pain, need their mama and daddy there to hold their hand in the back of the ambulance. Those hopes are dashed the second you both make it to the intersection and see the state of the eviscerated car, crumpled and folded in on itself with first responders carefully dismantling the steel skeleton piece by piece to retrieve survivors - or their bodies. You're out of the car before it's even fully stopped and racing towards the commotion, stopped by police officers holding the barrier around the site. Everything was white noise, though, when he saw three white sheets covering gurneys being solemnly loaded into ambulances, and he just knew in his heart one of them was your child. That nightmare was confirmed with the gutteral, inhuman scream that rips out of you as you collapse on the asphalt where tire marks were now burned into the surface, screaming to be let past, for someone to let you see your baby.

He wanted to scream, too, wanted to collapse or punch something or just double over and empty the contents of his stomach. But he couldn't do that right now, not when you were falling apart beside him, so he gathered you up in his arms silently and held on tight.