He said I was basically already gone. I heard it before I even stepped fully into the room, and for a moment, I honestly thought he was talking about someone else—an elderly patient, perhaps, or one of those cases lawyers whisper about with rehearsed sympathy.
But then he said my name. My name spoken as if I were a fading photograph, not a breathing woman standing in the doorway.
“Once she signs, the house is free,” my son told the lawyer. “She’s practically not there anymore. Mentally, emotionally, basically already gone.”
I felt something cold move up my spine, like a draft from a door I hadn’t noticed was open. He didn’t see me yet. Neither of them did. I stood there still as an old coat hanging on a hook, listening to my own son reduce me to a burden, an object, a piece of furniture he was eager to push out of the way so he could remodel the room.
The lawyer, a younger man with kind eyes that didn’t match his profession, hesitated. “Mr. Hail, I understand your concerns, but your mother is legally—”
That’s when I stepped forward. I didn’t plan it. My feet simply moved as if pulled by the last scrap of dignity I still had.
“Legally, what?” I asked, my voice quiet, but sharp enough to cut through the room.
They both froze.
Andrew’s head snapped toward me first. He went pale, the way people do when they’re caught saying the truth they never meant anyone to hear aloud. His mouth opened, but no words came out.
I walked toward the table, each step steady, though my heart was hammering like it hadn’t in years. I’d been a nurse for most of my life. I’d tended to dying men and screaming newborns. I’d held hands through pain worse than this. But nothing had prepared me for hearing my own child bury me while I was still on my own two feet.
The lawyer cleared his throat and stood up. “Mrs. Hail, I—”
“It’s all right,” I said, raising a hand. “You were doing your job. My son, on the other hand…”
I turned to Andrew. He couldn’t meet my eyes. That hurt in a way nothing else had. Cowardice always looks downward.
“Mom,” he finally muttered. “You weren’t supposed to hear that.”
“But I did.” I kept my voice calm, almost serene. Something in me had already begun to shift, settle, harden. “And I imagine it wasn’t the first time you said it. Just the first time I caught you.”
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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