The counselor closed her office door and finished the sentence, and I understood at last what those two words had meant every morning for two years, and why my granddaughter had chosen me, of all the people in her life, to send them to.
Still here. Every morning at seven fifteen. And every morning I wrote back, me too, because she asked me not to ask, and I would have written anything to keep that one small thread between us after her parents cut me off.
It was a safety plan. She had made it in 2023 with the people helping her, at a time when she was in more pain than a girl her age should ever carry. Those two words each morning were her telling someone, anyone, that she had made it through another night. And if they ever stopped, I was the person who was supposed to call for help.
She picked me. Not her mother, not her father. Me.
My sixteen year old granddaughter, in the hardest stretch of her young life, looked around at every adult she knew and chose her cut-off grandmother as the one she trusted to keep her safe, because she believed I was the one person in that family who would protect her and not hand her back to the very thing that was hurting her.
The reason she trusted me, the counselor said gently, was that she knew something of my own history, of a hard road I walked long ago and survived, and she believed a woman who had lived through that would understand and would never look away.
When the texts stopped in June, I did the only thing I knew, I got in the car and drove to her school, with no right to and no plan, only fear. And it turned out that was exactly what she had hoped someone would do. She had told them, if my grandmother ever comes looking, let her find me.
She is safe now. She had been in a program since the spring, getting real help from real people, and she is doing the slow work of getting better, and she is not alone in it anymore.
They let me see her. She is thinner and older around the eyes and she is still here, truly here, and when she saw me in that doorway she said the two words out loud for the first time, and I got to hold her while she said them.
We are allowed to talk now, with the counselors help, and I am not going anywhere. If you are someone sending those two words to somebody every morning, please keep sending them, and please let the people whose whole job is to help you carry the rest, because you deserve to still be here, and you are not alone.