N p

hich was somehow worse

like a woman who had never once watched this same voice explain, in a different hospital in a different version of this year, why he could no longer promise anyone's safety. He listened to my heartbeat with a stethoscope gone w

r the end, not unkindly. "More than

't slee

y of a man cataloguing small inconsistencies for later, filing them somewhere he thoug

like ho

on had softened into something almost gentle, something that made my chest hurt in a way I didn't

like the last time I saw them, shaking, covered in something I didn't let myself name even in memory. I could have told him what his voice so

. "There's n

o later rather than one he'd decided to let go of. But he didn't press, and I was grateful and furious about that in equal measure, because some small,

ough I felt him watching me go the same way I'd felt it the last time, in a version of this

them pressed flat against my stomach like I could keep something steady by holding it still. I gave the driver my grandmother's address without deciding

m childhood before I recognized anything else about the room. She took one look at my face and didn't ask what was wrong. She simply s

n, until the plates were full and there was some

id. "The doctor.

nd deliberate, but I watched something tighten around her eyes

uestion exactly, more like she was

me. I sat in that room and it was like watching a rehears

argument as before, grief and illusion and a mind protecting itself the on

n inch closer to my hand, an old habit, the kind of small physical correction she'd been making around me since I was a child too upset to rememb

mean you

as believing the whole shape of what you've told me. But I'm not going to sit here and call you foolish for being

it for belief anyway. But it was more than she'd given me the first time, and I held onto that the

to argue for more than she was offering. "You shouldn't be

f practiced silence that didn't need filling, and when she finally told me to go on up and rest, I went without pr

lar that I used to swear looked like a rabbit if you squinted. I lay down on top of the covers without changing out of my clothes, one hand re

es that didn't yet fit together into anything solid. I could go back to him. I could stay away from him entirely and hope distance did what warnings

an so much as a collection of things I was afraid to d

h no answer waiting on the other side of it, only the same quiet, familiar dread of a clock I c