And she was right that I’d been tired.
That was the thing that made the floor tilt under me.
For months I had been sick in ways no doctor in the city could explain — my liver numbers wrong, a bone-deep exhaustion, aching joints, strange blotches on my skin that came and went.
I had sat in specialists’ offices and been told they couldn’t find a cause.
I had begun to think I was simply, mysteriously, falling apart.
And now my mother-in-law was telling me I looked pale, resting her warm hand over mine, urging me to finish what she’d put in front of me — and for the first time in ten years, the tenderness in her voice sounded like something else entirely.