Someone made a phone call. Someone else brought a blanket I didn’t ask for. The fluorescent lights above me buzzed and flickered, and I stared at them because they were the only thing I could control—keeping my eyes open, keeping the light in.
Then a woman I didn’t know—a social worker, I think, though I didn’t know that word either—came and turned them off. “Try to sleep, sweetheart,” she said, and she meant well. I know that now.
But the darkness that fell when those lights went out was not the same darkness other children knew.
It was the darkness that meant my mother’s voice was never coming back. It was the darkness that meant my father’s hands would never lift me again. The darkness that ate parents whole and left their children sitting in plastic chairs with their feet dangling above the floor, waiting for someone to come and say it was a mistake.
It was just waiting and waiting in the black.
My grandma always found me in the dark. She’d just gathered me up, her arms strong and sure, and she said.
“I’m here now, baby girl. Grandma’s here.” And after that there would be a nightlight. Always a lamp left on. Something to push back against the thing that lived in the silence.
But there was nothing now. Just my phone’s weak beam and the shadows it couldn’t reach and the panic clawing its way up my throat.
Move. You have to move.
I forced my legs to work. One step. Then another.
The elevator—I needed to get to the elevator. The emergency lights would be on in the stairwell. The lobby would have backuppower. I just had to get out of this room, out of this darkness, out of this building that had suddenly become a tomb.
My shin cracked against something—a chair, a trash can, I didn’t know—and I bit down on a cry.
The elevator was close. I could see the faint outline of the doors in my flashlight beam.
I jabbed the button. Once. Twice. Again and again, harder each time, like desperation could make it work.
Nothing. The power was out. The elevator wasn’t coming. I was trapped.
The stairs. The emergency stairs.
I turned and stumbled toward the stairwell door, my breath coming too fast now, shallow gasps that weren’t getting enough air into my lungs.
The edges of my vision were starting to blur even in the darkness. I recognized the signs—panic attack, my old enemy, the thing I thought I’d outgrown years ago.
My hand found the door handle. I pulled.
It didn’t move.
I pulled harder. Threw my whole weight against it. Slammed my palm against the metal, once, twice, three times.
Locked. The door was locked from the other side.
The panic crested, hot and suffocating.
I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the floor, knees pulled to my chest, phone clutched in my shaking hand.
I was eight years old again. Waiting in that corridor. Waiting for someone to come.
I don’t know how long I sat there. Minutes. Hours. Time had stopped meaning anything.
Then—a sound. Footsteps. Getting closer. Heavier. Echoing through the darkness.
I stopped breathing entirely.
The stairwell door burst open, and light flooded through—real light, strong and steady, not the pathetic glow of my phone but a flashlight beam that cut through the black like a blade.
I threw my arm up to shield my eyes, a scream building in my throat?—
