That choosing is the hard part, the part no one tells you about.

Because the easy thing, after a week of silence, is to stop — to protect yourself, to let the hope die quietly so that it can’t keep hurting you.

Real hope, the kind that actually matters, is the daily decision to keep it alive against the evidence, to keep the lights on in a house no one has come home to, not because you are sure they will come, but because you refuse to be the one who gave up before they did.

I did not know, those weeks, whether my mother would ever come back to herself.