I closed my eyes, leaning my back against the cool plaster of the wall. For one terrible second, the supply closet smelled like harsh antiseptic, old paper, and pure terror. For one second, I was thirty-four years old again, standing in a sterile hospital corridor waiting for a surgeon to tell me whether my husband was still alive after his massive heart attack. Same icy hollowness. Same absolute certainty that my life had just split cleanly in two.
“I’m coming,” I said, my voice hard as iron. “Tell Sarah I am coming right now.”
I hung up the phone before Brenda could say something kind that would have shattered my composure.
Sarah. My sweet Sarah. Six months ago, she had called me on Christmas Eve from Juneau and casually mentioned she was exhausted, that the winter felt brutally long. She had laughed lightly and promised me she was fine. She had lied. Or, someone had systematically taught her to stay quiet about her suffering until silence felt like a mandatory duty.
I grabbed my purse, marched to the front desk, told the clinic manager I had a family emergency, and walked to my car with the same clipped, controlled stride I used when racing toward a trauma bay.
I packed a single carry-on bag in fourteen minutes. Sweaters, toiletries, blood pressure medication. And, without fully understanding why, the little pink construction-paper photo album Sarah had made for me for Mother’s Day when she was twelve. “My mom is the strongest person I know,” she had written in crooked glitter glue. I packed it because if I was about to walk into the room where my daughter was dying, I desperately needed to carry a version of her that hadn’t yet been broken.
