Page 72 of Shattered

Just stop.

“Mom?”

Nothing.

The silence was so loud it hurt. After days of constant beeping, the quiet felt violent. Wrong.

“Mom, no. Please. Not yet. I’m not ready. Please.”

The machines started screaming—alarms, nurses rushing in. Daniel appearing from somewhere, moving fast, doctors checking things and speaking in professional terms that felt obscene because this was our mother, not some patient, not some case study.

One of the doctors looked at the monitors, checked for a pulse I already knew wasn’t there.

“She’s gone.”

Two words that shattered everything.

I took her hands again and tried to understand how someone could be here one second and just gone the next.

How the person who’d given birth to me, who’d promised she’d love me even when she couldn’t remember my name—how that person could just stop existing.

Her hand was still warm.

She was still here.

Except she wasn’t. She was gone. That was what gone meant. That her hand could still be warm but the person who owned it had vanished.

Daniel was talking to the nurses, making arrangements in that flat doctor voice that meant he was holding himself together by force of will.

Axel appeared beside me. Put his hand on my shoulder.

“Delia.”

I looked up at him. At his gray eyes full of concern. At this man who loved me. Who’d been with me while my mother was dying.

Who I’d been with instead of being here.

“I need to go,” I said.

“Okay. I’ll drive you.”

“No. I mean I need to go alone. I need—” I couldn’t finish. Couldn’t explain that looking at him hurt. That his presence reminded me of where I’d been when she’d been struggling for her life. What I’d been doing while she’d been bleeding. “Just let me go.”

He stepped back, hurt flickering across his face.

I left without looking back.

The funeral happened a week later.

I moved through it in a fog. People kept touching me. Offering condolences. Saying things like “she’s in a better place”and “at least she’s not suffering anymore.”

I wanted to scream at them—wanted to say she’s not anywhere, she’s just gone, stop trying to make death sound peaceful when it’s just absence, just empty space where a person used to be.

But I just smiled and nodded and accepted their casseroles.

Sarah held my arm during the service. Kept me upright when my legs forgot how to function. Daniel gave the eulogy, talking about Mom’s life. Her love of art. Her dedication to teaching. Her battle with Alzheimer’s that she’d fought with grace.

I didn’t hear most of it.