I was already too late.

That thought has burned in my chest every single day since I walked through that gate.

But before the gate, before the white cloth, before the sound of that funeral trumpet, there was the telephone.

The first call came at 2:47 in the morning.

I know the exact time because the little red numbers on my bedside clock seemed to be shouting at me.

My hand shook as I reached for the receiver.

“Mama?”

The voice was thin and broken, like a child lost in the dark.

It was my daughter Bethany.

“Bethany, honey, what is wrong?” I whispered, so I would not wake Henry.

She was crying.

Not the kind of crying a mother hears over a skinned knee.

This was deeper.

This was the sound of a woman whose soul was being pulled apart.

“Mama, I’m so tired,” she said.

“I’m scared.

Please, please come get me.

I can’t take it anymore.”

I sat straight up in bed.

My chest froze.

“Bethany, are you hurt?

Is the baby okay?”

She did not answer.

She just sobbed into the phone, and every sob felt like a knife twisting between my ribs.

That was the first night.

Ten days earlier, Bethany had given birth to a beautiful baby girl in a small hospital in Nashville, Tennessee.

Her husband Dale Whitfield had taken her straight from the hospital to his family’s red-brick farmhouse in Cedar Grove, a little town about thirty miles away.

It was their custom, his mother said, for a new mother to stay quiet and confined for the first weeks after the baby came.

I wanted her home with me.

But Henry, my husband, kept telling me I had to respect their ways.

“She’s married now, Peggy,” he said the next morning after that first call.

“You can’t go running out there every time she gets a little weepy.

New mothers get emotional.

It’s normal.”

“That was not a little weepy,” I said.

My voice cracked.

“That was my baby girl begging for her life.”

Henry sighed and lowered his newspaper.

“You must endure it,” he said.

“She has a husband now.

Her place is with him and his family.

If you go out there making demands, you will only make things harder for her.”

I wanted to scream.

But I looked at his tired, kind face, and I let the fear win.

The second night, the call came again at 3:11 in the morning.

“Mama,” she whispered.

“Please, I’m so tired.

I’m scared.

I can’t take it anymore.”

The exact same words.

The exact same broken voice.

It was as if she had been repeating them all day, waiting for me.

“Bethany, honey, I’m coming,” I lied.

“I’ll be there in the morning.”

“Promise me, Mama,” she said.

“Promise me you’ll come.”

“I promise,” I said, and I meant it with every piece