My sister and I walked the same road—same medical school, same sleepless nights. But when it was over, our parents cleared her debt… and left mine behind.

That night, Jessica and I shared the attic room where we had mapped out our first year of college on notebook paper. “Do you ever think about how close we came to not recovering?” she asked, watching the radiator click like an old clock.

“All the time,” I said. “And then I think about what did recover us. Not the fellowship or the party. The small things we kept sending each other when no one was watching.”

“The coffee cups,” she said.

“The whiteboards,” I said.

“The cats,” she added solemnly, and we both laughed until the attic felt warm.

In December, I gave the talk Dr. Fleming had circled in her calendar like a holiday. The lecture hall at Hopkins was full of people who knew exactly how dangerous it is to declare anything promising in pediatric TBI. I kept my claims modest and my slides clean. Halfway through, while I stood at the podium explaining an anomaly in our interim data, I saw them: my parents, sitting side by side in the fourth row, programs in their laps like parishioners at a late service.