The chaplain said something practiced and kind. Dorothy never remembered the exact words. Not that night. Not later. Never. The sentence itself vanished, but the meaning remained, sharp as glass.
Your daughter is dead.
Dorothy sat down right there in the hallway, not in a chair, not carefully, but all at once, as if her bones had stopped taking instructions from her body. Cold tile pressed against her knees. Her purse slid from her shoulder. The world narrowed until all she could hear was the buzz of the fluorescent lights and those three crying babies somewhere beyond a locked door.
A nurse knelt beside her. Another brought water. The chaplain kept speaking softly, as if grief could be guided like traffic.
Dorothy lifted her face.
“My grandchildren?” she asked.
The nurse nodded quickly. “All three are stable. Small, but stable. Two girls and a boy.”
Two girls and a boy.
Colleen had called Dorothy two weeks earlier and laughed into the phone, out of breath from climbing stairs.
“If they all come out with my temper and Grant’s jawline,” she’d said, “we’re in trouble.”
Dorothy had laughed too.
Now the memory cut straight through her.