“You’re not weak,” I said.

“You’re the strongest person I know.

But you are never doing this alone again.”

She kept talking, low and steady, and I just listened, which was maybe the first useful thing I had done in three days.

She told me the mind doesn’t file those shifts away neatly; it keeps them loaded, ready, so that an ordinary Tuesday sound — a squeal of brakes, a phone, a particular beep from the microwave — could drop her straight back onto a ward that wasn’t there.

She told me she had started bracing for the phone the way you brace for a stair that isn’t there in the dark.