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She pulled up the window and let the cool wet air hit her face, hot from the radiators that had been turned too high for the April afternoon. The screens weren't in yet, but the spring bugs were only just waking from their cocoons, fuzzy-headed and too young to fly, so it didn't matter.
It was a day for cleaning, getting rid of big-buttoned toys that simply made music and making room for toys that were to be stacked or vroomed around racetracks or used to fight monsters.
The toddler bed had been moved away from the wall and her two boys were content poking the dead spider underneath. Coming back from downstairs with the vacuum, she was humming, her face already damp with earned sweat.
Though she would forever be haunted by the image of her younger child's body sprawled motionless on the wood pile two stories below the window she'd left open, there was something more awful about the seconds before that: the crash she heard as she reached the top of the stairs and the look on the face of her older boy at the window. In that moment, before she'd had the breath sucked out of her, there was still something alive within her, a flicker of self-devouring hope that all hadn't been
lost.
END
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