When you’re the parent of an infant, and it’s your first baby, you’re generally terrified of crib death. I know I was. You read up on it, buy the gadgets, follow all the rules and yet you still find yourself in those early days peering at your baby as they sleep, watching.

You watch, you reassure yourself it is fine, you go back to whatever you were doing and then the hairs rise on the back of your neck as the thought “but what if?” and you go and you check again. Sometimes you wake the baby when you check and can only blame yourself.

The thing about the fear of crib death is that every new day is a slight victory, the percentages go down. By six months it’s less than half it was at birth, by the time of the first birthday it is forgotten.

But you still remember the fear. You remember the eternity of it.

As your kid grows up, your fears change. It goes to other adults, other kids, people who could hurt them, harm them. As your kid hits puberty, you worry about the trials and tribulations they will go through, their ambitions, their heartbreaks, how they see themselves.

This may be one reason the description of Emily’s father hits so hard: she was a teen, just became a teen, and when he walked in that bedroom that morning he was brought back to that fear, that first primal fear, of staring at your baby and willing them to breathe.