She had spent so long braced against the worst that she had forgotten there was a version of the work that let her come home whole.

She found it.

It was not a smaller life.

It was a life she could actually live inside.

The choosing was harder than that one clean sentence makes it sound.

For weeks she circled it, sure that leaving the ICU meant she was weak, that the nurses who could take it were the real nurses and she was something less.