But in that room, in that moment, what my husband needed from me was not my grief.

It was my presence, and my clear head, and my legs carrying me to wherever he was.

The grief could wait its turn.

Chapter 10 — The Folder

He gave me the folder then, and I opened it with hands that did not feel like my own.

Inside were things I only half understood, scans of the brain and the nerves, charts that tracked something downward across a span of months, the clinical language of a body being mapped as it changed.

I did not have the training to read most of it.