Free The Mistletoe Promise by Richard Paul Evans Page A

I waited alone in a room for more than an hour. It seemed like no one knew what to do with me. A few police officers came in and asked me questions. Inanequestions. Did I know she was in the car? Had I left her in the car on purpose? When did I realize she was in the car? “Probably when I started screaming hysterically and collapsed,” I wanted to say.
    Then a man about my age came and talked to me. He wasn’t with the police. He wore a suit. His voice was calm. Sympathetic. He asked me questions, and I mostly just blinked at him. He told me that he was from the prosecutor’s office or someplace official. He finished with his questions and spoke with the police. There was a discussion on whether or not I should be arrested and fingerprinted, but the man intervened. The talk of court and jail scared me, but nothing they could do could match the pain I already felt. Someone asked if I wanted a sedative. I turned it down. I deserved to feel the pain. I deserved to feel every barb, every hurt, then, God willing, to die.
    And the barbs came. My Hannah’s death set off a firestorm of media. The television covered it, reducing my tragedy to four minutes of entertainment followed by a commercial for tires. Both newspapers, the Deseret News and The Salt Lake Tribune, weighed in. There were columns of letters to the editor about me. Some said I deserved life in prison for what I’d done. Some said I should be locked in a car with the windows rolled up. I agreed with the latter. The cruelest thing said was that I had killed my Hannah on purpose.
    Most confusing to me was how deeply people I didn’t know hated me. The attacks lasted for months. I don’t know why strangers went so far out of their way to hateme. Maybe it made them feel like better people. Or better parents. Maybe it convinced them that they would never do such a thing. Maybe it masked their fears that they were flawed like me.
    I noticed stories like mine everywhere. One British lawyer called it forgotten baby syndrome. It’s not a syndrome, I thought . It’s an accident. A horrible, exquisite accident. A failure of humanity.
    Once a psychiatrist on TV spoke out for me. He said, “Our conscious mind prioritizes things by importance, but our memory does not. If you’ve ever left your cell phone in your car, you are capable of forgetting your child.” He pointed out that this was an epidemic and there were scores of stories like mine. In one state three children died in one day. He said that this was a new phenomenon, that ten years ago it rarely happened because parents kept their babies near them in the front seat. Then airbags came, and our babies were put out of the way, where we couldn’t see them.
    He explained that there were two main reasons that people left babies in cars: change of routine and distraction. I’d had both. He said, rightly, that no punishment society could give could match what I was already feeling. I don’t know how he knew. I guess it’s his job to know.
    Through it all, Dan’s moods were as volatile as the Utah weather. He was supportive and sympathetic, then, sometimes in the same hour, angry and brooding. He was always moody. He was gone a lot. I didn’t know where he went. I didn’t really care. It was easier being alone. I was fired from my job, not that I could have worked. I stayed in bed mostof the time, hiding from the world, wishing that I could hide from myself.
    Then, one night, I got sick with appendicitis. If I had known that my appendix had already burst, I might not have gone to the hospital. If I had stayed home for just another hour or two, I could have ended it all. I had been given a way out. I don’t know why I didn’t take it. Perhaps, in spite of my self-loathing and pain, some part of me still longed to live.
    As I lay in bed wracked with fever, I thought about my life. It was then that I had an epiphany. It came to me that one day I might see my sweet little girl again. What if she asked me what I