Chapter 215

The doctor’s words have been looping in Elias’s head for six days straight, the same sentence arriving on repeat whenever the flat goes quiet enough to let it in.

You’re very fortunate you got there on time to save her life.

He is sitting in the chair beside his mother’s bed, watching her chest rise and fall in the thin grey light coming through the curtains, and thinking about how strange it is that a sentence meant to comfort him has instead become the thing keeping him up at night.

Fortunate. As if there was some other version of that afternoon where he came home twenty minutes later and found something he could not have fixed with a phone call and a set of steady hands.

He looks at her now, propped against the pillows, her skin still carrying that faint grey undertone the hospital never quite managed to talk him out of worrying about, and he tries to remember what she looked like before all of this. Before the drinking, before the coughing that never f