The cast-iron skillet slammed against the wooden headboard so hard the entire bed frame shook.

I didn’t flinch.

I didn’t even turn my head.

“It doesn’t matter that it’s your birthday!” my mother-in-law Lois screamed.

“Get up and make something for my son to eat!”

The skillet had landed only a few inches from where my head had been resting on the pillow.

I kept staring at the thin crack running across the bedroom ceiling.

It was the same crack my husband Dennis had been promising to fix for six months.

Every time I looked at that crack, I felt the weight of all the other promises he had broken.

Lois stood at the side of the bed with her arms stiff and her face burning with anger.

Her housecoat was the same faded rose color she wore every single morning.

“Dennis is going to come home from the lake house starving,” she said.

She pronounced the word home as if I had no right to be here.

“And you’re still lying here acting like royalty.”

I turned thirty-two that morning.

Before accepting a job at a small community clinic outside Kansas City, I had worked as a paramedic for five years.

I had handled serious highway collisions.

I had managed medical emergencies.

I had even helped deliver babies in the back of ambulances.

Staying composed while everyone else panicked had become part of who I was.

There was a night on a rain-slicked highway when a young couple’s car flipped three times.

I held that woman’s hand and told her to breathe while her husband bled beside her.

I kept my voice steady when another paramedic started shaking.