Her hand rested palm-up between us.
Slowly, carefully, I took it.
Her fingers were cold.
I held them like something precious and breakable.
The next morning, they wheeled her away just after sunrise.
Linda stood on one side of the gurney, crying despite trying not to. I stood on the other, holding Sophie’s overnight bag.
Sophie looked paler than usual under the surgical cap.
At the double doors, the nurse paused.
Only one of us could go farther.
Sophie looked at her mother.
Then at me.
For one terrible second, I thought she was going to choose me, and guilt surged through me on Linda’s behalf.
But Sophie reached for her mother’s hand.
“Mom,” she whispered.
Linda bent and kissed her forehead.
“I’m right here, baby.”
Sophie closed her eyes.
Then, just before they pushed her through the doors, she turned her head toward me.
“Ethan?”
I stepped closer.
“Yes?”
“When you go to my apartment again,” she said, her voice faint, “you can read the letter.”
Then the doors opened, and she was gone.
The waiting room became its own kind of wilderness.
Hours moved strangely there. Too slow to endure, too fast to trust. Linda and I sat side by side beneath a television neither of us watched. Coffee cooled in paper cups. Families came and went. Every time a doctor entered, everyone looked up.
Linda asked me once if I wanted to stretch my legs.
I said no.
At some point, she rested her hand over mine.
It was the first gentle thing she had done since I returned.
“She’ll fight,” Linda said.
“I know.”
“She always has. Quietly.”
I nodded.
“I didn’t understand that before.”
“No,” Linda said. “You didn’t.”
There was no cruelty in her voice.
Only truth.
Nearly five hours later, Dr. Shah appeared.
The surgery had gone well.
They had removed the tumor.
There were no immediate complications.
Sophie was in recovery.
Linda began to cry openly then. I stood very still, afraid that if I moved, I might collapse.
Dr. Shah continued explaining next steps, pathology, monitoring, medication, recovery. I heard it all through a haze of relief so fierce it almost hurt.
Sophie was alive.
She was alive.
When we were finally allowed to see her, she was groggy and pale, surrounded by soft machine sounds. Linda went in first.
I waited outside the room, staring at the floor.
