Page 26 of We Are Just Us

He was living in New York, but he moved back home.

The surgeries got more aggressive. The recoveries became slower, and the optimism thinned. She fought treatments she didn’t want because she wanted the outcome, not the process. Hospital stays stretched longer.

Complications multiplied.

One night—he couldn’t remember which stay, which surgery, which round of bad news—he broke.

She was lying in the hospital bed, hooked up to everything, and the doctor had just left after explaining that the scan showed something new. Something else. One more thing to fight.

Kieran sat beside her bed, the chair squeaking under him, and his face crumpled before he could stop it. The tears came fast and ugly—the kind he’d been holding back for years, maybe. The kind that pulled him under.

“Kieran.” Her voice was sharp. Stronger than it had any right to be.

He looked up, wiping his face with the back of his hand.

She was watching him with an expression he couldn’t read. Not angry, exactly, but not soft either.

“Stop,” she said.

“Mom.”

“I said stop.” She shifted in the bed, wincing, and pointed one thin finger at her own chest. “I’m the one in the hospital bed. Not you. You don’t get to fall apart right now.”

He swallowed. Nodded. Pressed his palms against his thighs until the shaking stopped.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be sorry. Calm down.” Her voice softened, just barely. “I need you steady.”

So he was.

He learned to hold it in. To save it for later, for the car, for the shower, for anywhere she couldn’t see. He got good at it. So good that eventually he forgot there was anything to hold back at all.

He watched her body betray her in small, relentless ways.

She tried to joke through it. Tried to keep things normal. Tried to ask about his life without asking the questions that might lead somewhere dangerous.

“How’s work?”

“Fine.”

“Anyone special?”

“No.”

She nodded, accepting answers that were true enough.

The night she died wasn’t dramatic. That part surprised him.

She’d been discharged after surgery, weakened but stable. Complications weren’t supposed to happen. Or if they did, they were supposed to announce themselves loudly, unmistakably.

Instead, she died quietly, alone in her bedroom while he slept down the hall.

He woke up to a silence that was wrong.

The house had a way of announcing her presence, with music, television, the sound of cabinets opening and closing. That morning, there was nothing.

He found her in bed, still, face relaxed in a way he hadn’t seen in years.