Chapter 144

#11

Elias’s POV

His mother cried when he told her.

Not sad crying. The other kind, the kind that comes from a place past hope, when something you stopped believing was possible suddenly becomes real and your body doesn’t have a clean response for it. She sat at the kitchen table and put her face in her hands and her shoulders shook as Eli stood across from her.

“Elias,” she said, when she could finally speak again. “Do you understand what this means?”

“It means we can cover the medication through the end of the year,” he said, because that was what it lmeant to him, the most immediate and concrete thing.

She looked up at him with red eyes and a kind of brightness in her face that he hadn’t seen in years, not the soft, tired warmth she sometimes managed