The sex with Layla.
The surrogacy search.
And now Syx—broken in ways I couldn’t fix, carrying trauma I couldn’t erase.
I couldn’t save everyone.
But I could try.
I turned off the kitchen lights and headed upstairs.
Tomorrow, I’d deal with Raymond. With the contract. With the woman who’d signed it.
But tonight, I’d done what I could.
And that would have to be enough.
Chapter 2
TRUTH RENOIS
The smell hit me first, like it always did.
Antiseptic trying to cover urine trying to cover something deeper—the smell of bodies giving up, of time running out in fluorescent-lit hallways. I stood in Room 247 at Magnolia Gardens, helping Mrs. Thibodeaux into a clean nightgown after she’d soiled herself for the third time that shift. Her hands shook as I guided her arms through the sleeves. She didn’t look at me. She never looked at me anymore. She was one of my favorites, and I hated seeing her diminish right before my eyes.
“There you go, Mrs. T,” I said softly, fastening the snaps at her shoulder. “All clean now.”
She stared past me at the wall, at nothing, at everything she used to be before dementia took it all away. Her daughter hadn’t visited in six weeks. I knew because I’d been here for every single one of those days, working doubles because the money was shit, but it was still money.
$14.50 an hour to wipe strangers’ asses and watch them forget your name.
I stripped the soiled sheets, balled them up, and tossed them in the hamper by the door. My hands were raw from bleach andindustrial soap, the skin around my knuckles cracked and angry. I’d stopped wearing lotion because it just made the sanitizer burn worse.
Down the hall, a call button chimed. Then another. Then a third, overlapping like a chorus of need that never stopped. Those lazy ass nurses at the station refused to lift a finger to help.
Machines beeped. Someone coughed wetly in the room next door. The silence from the residents was worse than the noise—that hollow quiet of people who’d run out of words, run out of fight, run out of everything except the slow countdown to the end.
I tucked Mrs. Thibodeaux into bed and pulled the blanket up to her chin. “Sleep good, okay?”
She didn’t answer.
She never did anymore.
I left the room, peeled off my gloves, and tossed them in the biohazard bin. My back ached. My feet ached. My whole body felt like it had been wrung out and left to dry. Twenty-seven years old, and I moved like I was sixty.
This was my life now. Double shifts at Magnolia Gardens because the divorce had taken everything else. Phillip had kept the house in Metairie—kept it in his name, kept the title, kept the keys. Kept the Nissan. Kept the savings account I didn’t even know he’d been draining for six months before he served me papers. He’d moved his side chick, Destiny, into that house before the ink was dry on the divorce decree. Twenty-two years old, worked the makeup counter at Macy’s, probably sleeping in my bed right now.
And I was here. Wiping down people who wouldn’t remember me tomorrow.
I clocked out at 11:47 PM and stood in the break room, staring at my reflection in the mirror above the sink. Holloweyes. Hair pulled back in a bun that had come half undone somewhere around hour six. Scrubs that smelled like industrial cleaner and sadness. I didn’t recognize the woman looking back at me. I had to quit nursing school because I couldn’t afford it anymore. Not only that, being a full-time student didn’t pay the bills I still had rolling in.
This wasn’t supposed to be my life.
I pushed through the back door into the parking lot. The cold air hit my face like a slap, sharp and clean after eight hours of recycled air and death. I stood there for a second, just breathing, letting the night wash over me.
Then, I started walking.
The bus had stopped running an hour ago, so I walked the twelve blocks from Magnolia Gardens to Mama’s shotgun house in the Seventh Ward. My feet screamed in my Walmart sneakers. My shoulders ached from lifting bodies that couldn’t lift themselves. But I kept moving because stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering everything I’d lost.
