I hung up before Brenda could say something kind that would have shattered my composure.

Sarah. My sweet Sarah. Six months ago, she’d called me on Christmas Eve from Juneau and casually mentioned she was exhausted, that the winter felt brutally long.

She’d laughed lightly and promised me she was fine. She had lied. Or someone had systematically taught her to stay quiet about her suffering until silence felt like a mandatory duty.

I grabbed my purse, marched to the front desk, told the clinic manager I had a family emergency, and walked to my car with the same clipped, controlled stride I once used racing toward a trauma bay.

I packed a single carry-on in fourteen minutes. Sweaters, toiletries, blood pressure medication. And, without fully understanding why, the little pink construction-paper photo album Sarah had made me for Mother’s Day when she was twelve.

“My mom is the strongest person I know,” she’d written in crooked glitter glue. I packed it because if I was about to walk into the room where my daughter was dying, I desperately needed to carry a version of her that hadn’t yet been broken.