I put on a clean shirt and that awful perfume, and I came inside and pretended I was fine, because you and Colm needed me to be.” She held up her hands, the ones she’d scrubbed raw in her sleep.

I understood them now.

She told me the rest of it there on the floor, quietly, in pieces — the shape of a thing she had been carrying alone for months.

The driveway had not started as a ritual.

It had started as one bad night, a shift so hard she couldn’t make herself walk in the door, and so she had sat in the car until she could rebuild her face.

And then it had happened again, and again, until the fifteen minutes in the dark had become the seam she used to hold two lives apart: the nurse who saw the things she saw, and the mother who tucked Colm in and read him another chapter and never let him see the weight of it.