I looked down.
In the column labeled "Mother," Nanette Harding's name was written in bold, unmistakable letters.
My fingers went rigid against the blanket. Phoebe seemed to sense my reaction and added in a small, guilty voice,
“Aunt Nanette is a really good dancer. She said she'd help me win first place.”
I remembered, suddenly, the first time Phoebe learned to dance at four years old. She'd fallen and bruised both knees, then threw herself into my arms crying, saying she only ever wanted Mommy to be with her.
I'd held her for a long time that day, rocking her until the tears stopped.
But now she was the one who'd crossed my name out with her own hands. I pushed the registration form back toward her.
“Then let her be the one to go with you from now on.”
Phoebe froze.
“Mom, don't be like this again. Aunt Nanette says you're always saying things just to make people feel bad.”
Footsteps sounded at the door. Oliver walked in, catching the tail end of that sentence.
He took one look at Phoebe's reddened eyes and his brow furrowed immediately.
“Shirley, she's seven years old. Do you really have to pick fights with a child?”
I said nothing. Phoebe ducked behind him and whispered,
“Daddy, does Mommy not want me anymore?”
Oliver's expression turned ice-cold.
“Shirley, are you done? If you hadn't blown everything out of proportion, Phoebe never would've asked Nanette to do the parent-child dance recital! You have no one to blame but yourself!”
Father and daughter stood together, one in front of the other. One thought I was being unreasonable. The other thought I was holding her back.
In that single moment, the last scrap of warmth left inside me vanished completely. I closed my eyes, too exhausted to fight, and let their voices crash around me without answering a single word.
I waited until deep into the night, when the nurse on duty thought I was asleep. Then I pulled the IV needle from my arm and followed the emergency stairwell up to the roof.
The hospital rooftop housed a plasma cold-storage unit. The temperature around it was brutal. I'd just lost blood, and my clotting disorder meant that if I stayed long enough, no one would be able to save me.
Cold air seeped through the gap beneath the door. I sat outside the storage room, slowly unwinding the gauze from my wrist. Blood welled up almost immediately, and the freezing wind turned the sting into something raw and biting.
The system alert chimed again.
“Life signs continuing to decline.”
I closed my eyes. For the first time, I felt at peace.
But after some unknowable stretch of time, frantic footsteps echoed from the far end of the corridor.
Oliver came rushing toward me. He scooped me up in his arms, his whole body shaking, yet even then the first words out of his mouth were blame.
“Shirley! Do you have to pull something like this right before Phoebe's rehearsal?”
He carried me back to the room. The doctor was already waiting at the door.
A space heater was wheeled to the bedside. A nurse cut away the gauze that had frozen stiff with blood, and their faces grew grimmer with every layer.
“Her core temperature is dangerously low. Possible hypothermic tissue damage.”
“Blood pressure is still dropping. Push the reversal meds now!”
“Mr. Gilbert, any later and your wife might have——”
Oliver whipped around so fast the doctor swallowed the rest of the sentence.
His fingers were clenched around my chart, knuckles white.
“Save her. Shirley can't leave me. She's pulled through every crisis before on her own, and this time is no different!”
No one in the room dared respond.
I lay on the bed, listening to the monitors beep one pulse at a time, while images from years ago drifted up before my eyes.
Back then, no one called Oliver "Mr. Gilbert."
He was just the least-regarded youngest son of the Gilbert family, wearing a lab coat washed so many times it had gone gray, clutching a stack of rejected project proposals, smoking by the hospital's back entrance.
I asked him if he truly wanted to keep chasing his dream of being a doctor. With his family background, all he had to do was give up medicine and go home to take over the business. He didn't have to suffer like this.
He looked up at me, eyes full of exhaustion.
“I do. But no one believes in me.”
I respected him. I admired him. I stayed up with him revising proposals page by page, ran around with him chasing investors, stood with him in the rain for three hours just to get a meeting with one potential backer.
