The rain had not stopped for three days.
It wasn’t dramatic rain, not the kind that lashes sideways and sends people running for shelter. It was the slow, relentless kind that seeped into everything, a constant gray curtain between the world and the sky. From the hospital waiting room, I watched the drops bead on the long pane of glass, gather themselves into trembling little bodies, and then slide down in wandering paths.
Sometimes they met another drop halfway.
Sometimes they merged and fell faster.
Sometimes they hesitated, clinging to the glass until gravity finally insisted.
After a while they all blurred together, streaks of water on a dirty window.
I realized I’d been staring so long my eyes hurt. I blinked, and the room swam back into focus: the stiff plastic chairs, the flickering soda machine, the muted television looping the same bad daytime show.
A child whined somewhere behind me; a nurse laughed softly at something a colleague said.
The air smelled like bleach and microwaved food.
My life felt like those raindrops—shapeless, uncontrollable, slipping away in directions I hadn’t chosen.
Two floors above, machines were breathing for my brother because his lungs had forgotten how.
I checked my phone for the hundredth time. No new messages.
No call from the doctor.
No miraculous change.
Just the same photo lighting up my screen when it went idle: Tommy standing in our mother’s backyard, grinning with a burger in one hand and a beer in the other, a ridiculous novelty apron tied around his waist.
KISS THE COOK, it demanded in huge red letters. He’d bought it for himself, because of course he had.
He’d worn it for every barbecue since.
The last time I saw him wearing it, I’d been teasing him about his uneven burger patties. He’d chased me around the yard with the spatula while Sarah—the woman he was supposed to marry next year—laughed so hard she’d nearly fallen off the lawn chair.
That had been two months ago.
Now he lay upstairs with a fractured skull, a collapsed lung, and enough metal in his leg to set off airport security from ten yards away.
The drunk driver who’d hit him had walked away with a few scratches and a lawyer.
I tried not to think about that.
When I did, my hands shook and I wanted to throw something, and tired nurses gave me careful looks like I might become a Problem.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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