Their composure, in that moment, told me everything I would ever need to know about them.

A parent whose child is dying does not arrive composed.

A parent whose child is dying arrives undone, disheveled, frantic, the way Gabriel had been undone all night, the way I had been.

Composure at the door of a dying child’s ward is not strength; it is distance, the distance of people whose hearts were never fully invested to begin with.

I watched my parents step out of that elevator with their coats folded neatly over their arms, crisp and controlled, asking after their daughter in the measured tones of people inquiring about a delayed flight, and I understood, with a cold final clarity, that the coldness I had noticed at the edges of my childhood had never been reserve or privacy or stiffness.