I was in the hospital for weeks and nearly lost my life, and nobody in my family came to see me.
Not my mother.
Not my father.
Not my younger sister.
The first sound I remember after the darkness was the hospital monitor counting what felt like borrowed seconds.
Beep.
Pause.
Beep.
The room smelled like disinfectant, metal rails, and the lemon lotion the nurses used after washing their hands so often the skin around their knuckles cracked.
The ceiling above me was one long fluorescent blur.
When I tried to swallow, my throat felt stripped raw.
“Easy,” someone whispered.
I turned my head and saw my husband, Ethan, sitting beside my bed in a blue vinyl chair that looked too small for the grief it was holding.
His shirt was wrinkled.
His beard had grown in patchy and uneven.
There were purple half-moons under his eyes, and his hand was wrapped around mine like he had been afraid I would vanish if he let go.
When he saw that I was awake, his face broke.
“Oh, thank God,” he said.
My name is Mallory Hayes.
I was thirty-three years old, a senior payroll manager, and I had spent most of my adult life believing that being needed was the same thing as being loved.
It is not.
Sometimes being needed only means you are the easiest number in somebody’s phone.
The last thing I remembered before waking up in that bed was the copier room at work.
I had a stack of reports pressed to my chest.
My coworker Jenna called my name from the hallway.
The carpet tilted.
The ceiling came down too fast.
After that, there was nothing.
“How long?” I asked Ethan, though my voice barely made it past my lips.
He squeezed my hand.
