I have come to think that this is how the largest changes in a life almost always arrive, not with a warning, but disguised as an ordinary Tuesday, with a lunchbox on the passenger seat.

Chapter 5 — Something Felt Wrong

But from the moment I walked through the hospital doors, something felt wrong, in the way a room feels wrong when everyone in it knows something you do not.

I made my way up to the nurses’ station on his floor, a place I had visited a dozen times over the years, where the staff knew me by name and always greeted me warmly.

But the woman behind the desk, a nurse I had known for years, looked up and saw me, and the smile that had started to form on her face simply stopped, froze, and fell away.