“I’m fine, Mom,” she said through the wood. Her voice was quiet, but it sounded normal. It sounded like the girl who used to help me carry the groceries from our old Buick LeSabre.

Thirty minutes.

My hands were shaking so badly I almost dropped the phone. I kept thinking that any second, a human voice would break through the static.

A professional. Someone who knew the exact words to say to a sixteen-year-old girl who had stopped wanting to live.

But the music just kept looping.

At minute 41, the water faucet stopped running. A second later, I heard the sharp click of the brass deadbolt sliding into place.

I dropped the phone. It hit the linoleum floor with a loud crack, the screen splintering into a spiderweb of green lines. The music was still playing from the speaker.

I ran down the hallway. I grabbed the brass doorknob and twisted it. It wouldn’t budge.

“Chloe! Open the door!” I screamed. My voice didn’t sound like mine anymore.

There was no answer from inside. Just a dull, heavy silence.

I didn’t think about my shoulder. I just backed up against the opposite wall of the narrow hallway and threw myself forward. The wood groaned. I did it again, my shoulder screaming in pain as the frame began to splinter. On the third strike, the latch gave way with a sound like a gunshot.

I fell into the bathroom.

Chloe was on the floor, her back against the bathtub, her eyes closed. There was an empty brown bottle of generic sleep aids from Meijer sitting on the bath mat.

I pulled her to her feet, my fingers digging into her arms. I didn’t scream at her. I just carried her to the front door, shouting into the empty street for help.

The paramedics arrived in eight minutes. We live three blocks from the station, and I could hear the siren from the moment they turned onto our avenue. They were fast. They were professional.

But when we left the house, my phone was still lying on the kitchen floor.

Chloe spent four days in the pediatric intensive care unit. She was physically stabilized within the first six hours, but her spirit seemed to have retreated somewhere deep inside her. She wouldn’t look at me. She spent the days staring at the gray privacy curtain, her fingers tracing the hem of the hospital gown.

I sat in the stiff green vinyl chair beside her bed, my joints aching from the hospital air conditioning.

On Thursday morning, I went back to the house to gather some clean clothes for her. The kitchen was exactly as we had left it. The algebra homework was still on the island. The yellow pencil was lying on the floor.

And my cracked cell phone was sitting on the counter. The battery had finally died, but when I plugged it in and turned it on, the call log showed the final duration of that hotline call.