The hospital called me just before midnight and said my six-year-old son was dying.
But the part that still haunts me is not the phone call.
It is the sound of my mother laughing when I asked what had happened—and my sister speaking as if she were talking about a knocked-over glass of milk.
“He got what he deserved.”
I was standing in the hallway of a Denver hotel at 11:47 p.m., still wearing my conference badge, with one heel already grinding a painful blister into my foot. I had just stepped out of a client dinner and was mentally rehearsing the presentation that might save my job the next morning.
