Dismissed.
I stumbled back into the waiting room, my legs suddenly unsteady. The fluorescent lights seemed brighter now, harsher. The air too thin.
I sank into one of the plastic chairs and stared at the floor.
Rose had been alive. Briefly. Conscious enough to see someone. To speak, maybe. To know she was dying.
And I wasn’t there.
I hadn’t even been in the same country.
Tears blurred my vision before I could stop them. I pressed my hand to my mouth, trying to hold it together, but the weight of everything—the city, the language, the bureaucracy, the unanswered questions—crashed down all at once.
I felt small. Stupid. Like a child who’d wandered into a world she didn’t understand and been punished for it.
You Americans.
I hugged my arms around myself and let the first sob break free, then another. My shoulders shook as I bent forward, grief spilling out in messy, humiliating waves.
No one came to comfort me.
The receptionist glanced over once, then looked away. The television droned on. Life continued.
I cried, anyway.
Right there in the waiting room, surrounded by strangers and silence and the knowledge that my sister’s last moments belonged to someone else.
I didn’t know how long I sat there like that—folded in on myself, breath hitching, tears sliding down my face unchecked. Time lost its edges in that waiting room. It stretched and warped, minutes swelling into something heavier, harder to carry.
At some point, my crying quieted into something smaller. Quieter. The kind of grief that lived in your chest instead of spilling out of it.
I wiped at my cheeks with the sleeve of my sweater, embarrassed by the wet tracks, the red swelling around my eyes. I was a grown woman. And I felt utterly unmoored.
I tried to steady my breathing the way I’d learned to do in moments of panic—slow in through my nose, slower out through my mouth—but every inhale seemed to catch on the same thought.
Rose had been awake.
She’d known she was hurt. Maybe dying. She’d been aware enough for someone to visit her, to hold her hand, to take her things when it was over.
And I had been walking through my life in New York, assuming there would always be time.
The idea hollowed me out.
I lifted my head and looked around the waiting room again. The man in work clothes was gone now. The elderly woman still sat rigidly in her chair, eyes fixed straight ahead, her face a mask of practiced endurance. A nurse passed through the room without looking at me, shoes squeaking faintly against the floor.
No one asked if I was okay.
No one here had time for that.
I stood slowly, my legs stiff, and crossed to the bathroom at the end of the hall. The mirror over the sink reflected a version of me I barely recognized—eyes glassy and rimmed red, hair escaping its loose tie, mouth drawn tight like I was bracing for impact.
I splashed water on my face, gripping the porcelain edge of the sink as I leaned forward.
Get it together, I told myself.You can fall apart later.
But the thought rang hollow.
I straightened and studied my reflection again.
