When She Heard Her Name

In 2018, a woman named Elena Vasquez sat in a San Antonio hospital room, clutching her phone, staring at the door. Her seventeen-year-old son Marco had been in a catastrophic car accident on Interstate 35. The doctors used words like "unsurvivable." She had already called her mother. She had already started making arrangements in her mind — the suit he wore to prom, the song he loved, the unbearable task of choosing a casket for your child.…