By the time I reached Waiting Room, my hands had stopped trembling.
My chest hadn’t.
Inside was a hospital visitor sticker from almost a year earlier.
On the back: “She said her mother laughed like she was trying not to.”
I went cold.
That was me.
Thomas had asked me that on the first day we met.
Not how my mother died.
Not how long I had been grieving.
What did she laugh like?
I had nearly walked away.
Instead, I sat beside him in the waiting room and answered.
“Like she was trying not to.”
Thomas smiled then.
“Those are the best ones.”
I was 29 when I met him, although I had felt much older for months.
After my mother died, my life didn’t collapse in some dramatic way. It simply stopped moving.
I went to work.
I paid the bills.
I answered messages with little smiling faces.
