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.
