By the time I reached Waiting Room, my hands had finally gone still. My chest hadn’t. Inside was a hospital visitor’s sticker, the adhesive long gone brittle, dated almost a year back. On the back: She said her mother laughed like she was trying not to.
I went cold all over, because that was me. That was the exact thing Thomas had asked me on the very first day we met — not how my mother had died, not how long I’d been grieving, but “What did she laugh like?” I’d almost walked away from the strangeness of the question. Instead I’d sat down next to him and answered honestly. “Like she was trying not to.”
He’d smiled at that. “Those are the best ones,” he’d said, and I hadn’t understood what he meant. I still wasn’t sure I did.
I spread every envelope across the table until they covered it edge to edge — bus stop, grocery store, airport, laundromat, park bench, waiting room, chapel. Seven ordinary places. Seven unfinished stories, none of them mine, and yet somehow all of them were about me too.
