Michael Harrison’s alarm went off at 5:30 every Tuesday morning as if it had made a personal decision about it. Three sharp beeps, short and deliberate, and he was already lunging before the third one finished, silencing it with the practiced reflex of someone who had learned that thirty seconds of recklessness could cost him an hour. If Lily woke too early, the whole morning turned.
It started innocuously enough, a shoe that couldn’t be found, cereal tipped by a sleeve, something wrong with the shirt she had been perfectly happy with the night before. But those small things had a way of linking into a chain that pulled everything down with it, and by the time he had located the shoe and wiped up the cereal and talked her out of the shirt crisis and found the permission slip she suddenly remembered, he would be sweating through his collar and the bus would already be at the end of the block. He killed the alarm, lay there for one careful breath, then swung his feet to the floor.
In the kitchen at 5:37, under the yellow overhead light that he kept meaning to replace with something less institutional, he cracked eggs into a pan with one hand and unrolled a sheet of wax paper with the other. Peanut butter sandwich, crusts off. Apple slices.
A granola bar that he told himself was not basically candy. He poured coffee into the same faded mug every morning, a travel mug with a Portland skyline that had been a gift years ago from someone he no longer thought about, and he drank it black because buying creamer had become the kind of small expense he now noticed. Single fatherhood had taught him to do ten things badly all at once and still count it as a win if his daughter got to school fed and clean and in possession of whatever she needed that day.
At 6:10, he knocked on Lily’s bedroom door. No answer. At 6:12, he tried again.
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