Page 44 of What You left in Me

She nearly smiles. Nearly.

She leaves and I sit with the steady noise and the soft green of the monitor. I let the guilt and the longing and the love make a terrible soup in my chest. It’s too salty and not enough of anything I recognize, but it’s mine.

Around noon, Julian returns with sandwiches and a schedule he’s typed into his notes app like a war general planning a siege.

“I blocked out time with the nurse manager,” he says. “You’ll go home and nap at three. I’ll sit with your mother from three to six. Then we’ll switch. Tonight, I’ll stay. Tomorrow I’ll cancel D.C. altogether if I have to.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I say, automatically. It’s my reflex. Don’t let anyone bend too far for me. Bending breaks things.

“I want to,” he says, and he means it. “You’re my priority.”

The word should make me weep into his sensible jacket. Instead, it lands and rolls under the bed like a lost penny. I nod. “Okay.”

The afternoon stutters by in doses of beeps and whispered updates and the soft thud of nurses’ shoes. I talk to Richard about nothing— Mr. Barlow’s new haircut, the kid who turned in a sonnet about Fortnite that made me choke laugh, Penny’s latest disastrous Tinder date, the neighbor’s cat that has adoptedour porch like it pays rent. I avoid saying the word hemorrhage. I avoid saying Finn. His name or existence.

When the clock nudges two-thirty, Julian presses a hand to the small of my back and says, “Go. Lie down for an hour. I’ll sit with him. Your mother’s finally agreed to eat something, even a lowly sandwich from a commonplace bakery. It’s a miracle. Somebody should alert the press expeditiously.”

“I don’t want to leave,” I say, because I don’t.

“You need to.”

He doesn’t say it like a command. He says it like a kindness.

It still feels like a leash.

But I go, because I am a good girl who does what keeps the machine running.

Down the hall, through the elevator, past the same potted plant that is losing a war with existence. Outside, the sky has the washed-out look it gets after too many people have wished on it. I take one step toward the parking lot and stop because my legs have opinions I didn’t clear with them.

In the glass of the hospital doors, my reflection looks like a woman trying to be several women. Daughter. Fiancée. A treacherous person who is not thinking about kissing someone she is absolutely not allowed to think about kissing. It’s… a lot.

My phone buzzes.

Penny:Did you eat?

Penny:Also, I’m outside with a bag of chips and zero patience, don’t fight me.

I grin at the screen even as my eyes sting. God bless Penny and her chaos.

Penny is my best friend in the way you only get one, loud, loyal, and chronically underdressed for the weather. We met the first week Mom and I moved into this house. Back when I was a teenager pretending not to cry unpacking books, and she marched up the driveway in a sunflower sundress and Doc Martens, handed me a contraband cherry popsicle, and said, “Hi, I’m your person now.”

She lived two streets over back then, a bonfire of freckles and opinions, and she’s been my emergency contact for bad days ever since.

She lives in Jersey now, shoebox apartment over a bodega, a place that always smells faintly like coffee and rain, juggling two creative-adjacent gigs and a rotating cast of rescue dogs. She’s only just showing up in this circus because real life had her on a short leash: end-of-month deadlines, a busted PATH line, and a borrowed Corolla that eats gas like it’s a hobby. She snagged three days off, stuffed a duffel with chaos and snacks, and pointed herself at Willowridge the second I called her crying last night after Julian went back to the hospital to bring Mom some supplies.

Penny arrives like weather: you cannot schedule her; you look up and there she is, exactly when I need a human bullhorn who loves me enough to tell me the truth and then shove a bag of chips in my hands while I hear it.

I turn and there she is.

Penny’s beat-up sedan honks cheerfully like a sitcom entrance. “Get in loser,” she calls out the window, “we’re getting protein bars and denial.”

Despite myself, I have to laugh.

I wave at her and climb into her car. There is a family-sized bag of Doritos on the seat and a can of Dr. Pepper sweating in the cupholder.

“You look like a ghost,” she says, blunt, eyes kind.

“Thanks,” I say. “I feel like one.”