The words caught somewhere low and buried, trapped behind the sharp pull in her chest and the sudden, hot sting rising in her throat.
Her mother’s hand was still wrapped around hers, steady now, fingers warm despite the chill in Hazel’s skin.
And that sentence—I always wanted to— echoed in the spaces Hazel had spent years trying to seal up. The ones she’d patched over with habit and work and distance. The ones where she’d hidden the ache of birthdays forgotten, school plays missed, the smell of burnt toast and panic thick in the walls of her childhood home.
She blinked hard.
It would have been easier if her mother had said nothing. If she’d stayed vague, or surface-level, or disappeared behind the fog of her illness like so many times before.
But she hadn’t.
She’dremembered.And she’dmeantit.
And Hazel, for all her careful boundaries, felt something inside her crack wide open.
She nodded, just once, and squeezed her mother’s hand within her own, leaning a little closer.
“I know,” she said, voice low and ragged at the edges. “I know you did, Mom. It’s okay.”
And she did know. Now, with all the distance, itwasokay. Even if it didn’t change what came after. Even if it couldn’t fix what had already been lost. It mattered, anyway.
They didn’t talk much after that.
Not because the conversation had run out, just because it didn’t need to be filled. The quiet between them had changed its shape. It was no longer fragile or tense.
Her mother leaned back into her chair again, a contented little sigh escaping her lips as she looked back out at the snow-speckled trees.
“You should get going before the roads get bad,” she said eventually, without turning her head. Not a dismissal, just something real. A lingering piece of being a mother that had held on, after all this time.
Hazel didn’t argue. She didn’t want to leave, but she also didn’t want to risk trying to stretch the moment too far. She knew better than that.
She stood, reaching for her coat. Her sleeves were still warm from the radiator beneath the window. Her movements felt distant, like watching someone else perform a ritual she knew by heart.
Her mother looked up again, still smiling softly. “Will you come again?” she asked.
The question was simple, but something about it fractured Hazel clean through.
Notcan you, notmaybe. Just:will you?
Hazel swallowed against the knot rising in her throat and she nodded once.
“I will,” she said. “Soon. I promise.”
Her mother’s smile deepened, the corners of her eyes crinkling faintly.
“Good,” she said. “I’ll keep the birds company until then.”
Hazel laughed, though it sounded more like a breath than a sound. She lifted a hand, half wave, half goodbye, and turned toward the door.
The hallway felt colder than before. More echoing. She moved past the recreation room again, past the nurses’ station and the bulletin board with the same faded construction-paper snowflakes pinned to it. The elevator took longer this time. Or maybe she just noticed the wait more.
She didn’t look at herself in the reflective metal of the doors.
Outside, the wind had picked up. It nipped at the edges of her coat as she stepped back into the grey afternoon.
She climbed into the driver’s seat of her car and shut the door. The silence hit her like a wave. Not the silence of the room upstairs— that had been warm, held in chamomile and wool and the steady rhythm of her mother’s peaceful voice. That silence had been alive with memory, soft with presence.
This one was cavernous. Sharp and hollow, the kind that echoed in the bones.
