I was twenty-nine when I met Thomas, though grief had been aging me faster than my birthdays could keep up. My mother had died the winter before, and instead of falling apart the way people expect, I had simply gone quiet. I went to work. I paid the electric bill. I answered texts with the little smiling face that means nothing. Then I started volunteering at the hospital, because the first time I watched someone die with nobody beside them, something in me refused to let that happen again on my watch. I held cups of water to cracked lips. Read the newspaper aloud to people who’d stopped listening. Learned which rooms were always freezing and which nurses hummed to themselves when the shifts ran long.
People called that generous. It wasn’t. I was hiding in the one place where my own grief made sense next to everyone else’s.
