The fluorescent lights in Boulder Memorial’s emergency room cast everything in shades of blue and white—clinical, sterile, unforgiving. At 11:34 PM on Christmas Eve, I was three hours into manually compressing a stranger’s chest, willing his heart to remember its rhythm, when my phone vibrated against my hip. I ignored it.
The man on the table—mid-fifties, construction worker, father of three according to his wife sobbing in the waiting room—had sworn he was fine right up until his heart stopped between bites of his holiday dinner.
“Come on,” I muttered, hands locked, shoulders burning.
“Come on.”
The monitor beeped.
Once. Twice.
A rhythm emerging from chaos.
“We’ve got him,” announced Dr. Reyes, our attending.
“Good work, Vale.
Go take five.”
I stepped back, peeling off my gloves, and finally checked my phone.
One message from Lennon, my sixteen-year-old daughter, sent forty minutes ago: They said there’s no room for me at the table. My first thought was that she was joking, sending me some cryptic teenage humor I’d need her to explain later.
But Lennon didn’t joke like that. Lennon was careful with words, choosing each one like she was afraid of using too many.
I called her immediately.
No answer.
I tried again. Nothing.
The rest of my shift passed in a fog of controlled panic—triaging a kitchen burn, stitching a gash from a sledding accident, setting a wrist broken during an enthusiastic game of backyard football.
All routine, all manageable, but my mind was forty miles north in Aspen Creek, trying to understand what “no room” meant when my parents hosted Christmas dinner every year in a house with eight bedrooms and a dining room that seated twenty comfortably. At 11:48 PM, I finally clocked out, scraped ice off my windshield, and drove home through snow that fell in thick, lazy spirals, the kind that makes the world look soft even when everything in it is sharp.
When I opened the door to our apartment in East Boulder, the first thing I noticed was the silence—not the comfortable quiet of a sleeping house, but the hollow absence of sound that follows something breaking.
Lennon’s boots sat by the door, crusted with snow, still laced.
Her overnight bag leaned against the wall, unopened.
She was supposed to be in Aspen Creek, sleeping over at my parents’ house the way she had every Christmas Eve since she was old enough to remember. This year she’d been so proud to drive herself, license warm in her wallet, independence bright in her eyes. Instead, I found her on our secondhand couch, still wearing her coat—a green parka I’d bought her last winter—knees pulled to her chest like she was trying to make herself smaller.
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