A glacial terror crystallized in my lungs. Sepsis. Survives.
They allowed me two minutes in the pre-op staging area. Ethan looked impossibly small beneath the starchy white hospital blankets, his usually flushed cheeks drained to the color of old parchment. I gripped his clammy hand, pressing it against my lips. He was trembling violently, caught in the grip of a fever that was cooking him from the inside out.
“Mom?” Ethan’s voice was a fragile, broken whisper. “Am I going to die?”
“No, baby,” I choked out, forcing a smile that felt like shattered glass against my lips. “You are going to be completely fine. I am anchored right here. I am not moving a single inch.”
As the orderly wheeled his gurney past the heavy metallic doors of Surgery Room 4, the finality of the latch clicking shut echoed in my bones. I was utterly alone in a room full of strangers.
My hands shook so violently I dropped my phone twice before I managed to unlock it. I opened the group thread labeled The Family . These were my people. My mother, Eleanor. My father, Arthur. My older brother, James, the golden boy. And my two sisters, Lauren and Michelle. The people whose birthdays I funded, whose holidays I hosted, whose crises I had managed for a decade.
