There is a particular kind of stillness that follows the worst moment of your life.
The world around you keeps moving. Carts roll past in hallways. Voices carry from distant rooms. Someone somewhere is laughing about something ordinary. And you stand in the middle of all of it completely unable to understand how any of it is still happening, because the thing that just occurred has made the continued motion of the world feel almost incomprehensible.
Ember stood in that stillness in a hospital corridor on the afternoon her husband Anthony died.
She had been married to him for nearly twenty-five years. She had sat beside his bed every single day of the two weeks he had been hospitalized, talking to him about neighbors and grocery lists and the kitchen faucet that had been dripping for longer than either of them wanted to admit.
She had kissed his forehead an hour before his surgery and made him smile with a joke about flirting with his surgeon for medical updates.
That joke had been the last full sentence he ever heard her say.
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