Nobody told me what to do after the doors closed. So I sat down on a hard plastic chair outside the emergency room and waited.
Above the door was a red light.
As long as it stayed on, the doctors were still inside with my mommy.
So I watched it. I didn't blink more than I had to. I was afraid that if I looked away even for a second, something would change and I would miss it. So I kept my eyes on that small red circle and I made it a promise. *Stay on. Stay on. Stay on.*
Every second felt like an hour.
People walked past me constantly. Nurses in blue uniforms. Doctors with serious faces that never looked quite finished, like they were always thinking about something heavier than the room they were standing in. Sometimes they glanced at me with pity. Sometimes they didn't look at me at all.
To them I was just another child in a hallway.
But to me that hallway was the entire world. My mommy was behind that door and there was a wall between us and I couldn't break it down and I couldn't climb over it and nobody was going to let me through.
I pulled my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around them as tight as I could.
My mommy always told me I was a strong girl.
I was trying so hard to believe her.
But strength is a difficult thing to hold onto when you are six years old and your hands are still small and everything around you is too big and too bright and smells like something you don't have a name for.
Eventually the door opened.
A nurse stepped out and I was on my feet before she finished turning around.
"Where is my mommy?"
She crouched down in front of me. Her eyes were kind but careful, the way adults look at you when they are about to say something they have already practised.
"She's not dead," she said gently.
The word *dead* landed in my chest like a stone dropped into still water. I felt the ripples move through me even though I nodded like I understood. I didn't fully understand death yet. But I understood that it was the thing you didn't come back from. And she had said my mommy wasn't that.
So I held onto it.
"She's just sleeping."
*Sleeping.* That word I knew. Sleeping meant morning. Sleeping meant you opened your eyes again.
"When will she wake up?"
The nurse hesitated. Just for a second. But I noticed. I noticed everything that night.
She looked back at the door. Then she looked at me.
"We don't know."
Those three words sat inside me like something cold.
Behind her, the man who had been driving the car was still standing near the wall. He had been there the whole time, turning his car keys over and over in his hands like he didn't know what else to do with them. He kept saying he was sorry. Again and again, the same words, wearing them down until they had no weight left.
"I didn't see her. It happened so fast."
He said he would pay the hospital bills.
I stared at him and said nothing. He was looking for something from me. Forgiveness maybe. Or just acknowledgement. But I had nothing to give him. Money couldn't reach behind that door. Money couldn't pull my mommy back from wherever she had gone inside herself.
After some time a doctor came to talk to me. He had a clipboard and a tired face and he asked questions in the way adults ask questions when they already suspect the answers will be unhelpful.
"Where is your father?"
Something shifted in my stomach.
"I don't know."
"What is his name?"
The silence that followed felt enormous. My mother had never allowed me near that question. Any time I wandered too close to it she would feel it somehow, even from across the room, and her expression would close like a door being shut firmly but quietly.
*He is not a good person.*
That was all she ever gave me. Not a name. Not a face. Just those six words and the understanding that I was not supposed to want more.
So the doctor stopped asking. And I went back to my chair. And I went back to watching the red light.
It stayed on for a very long time.
When it finally turned off they moved my mommy to another room. A different kind of room, quieter, with machines instead of urgency. But they still wouldn't let me see her.
"She needs to rest," the nurse said.
"How long?" I asked.
She didn't answer.
The hours passed the way hours pass when you have nothing to do but feel them. I fell asleep on the hospital chair at some point, my cheek pressed against the hard plastic armrest, my knees still pulled to my chest. When I woke up the lights in the hallway were dimmer and the nurse told me it was night.
I stayed the next day.
And the day after that.
Three days. Three days of watching doors and listening for footsteps and eating almost nothing because food required a kind of attention I couldn't spare. Three days of people walking past me like I was part of the furniture, a small girl folded into a chair, waiting for something that didn't come.
My mommy never walked out.
On the third night the nurse came back. She sat beside me this time, which felt different. More serious.
"You can't stay here anymore," she said.
"But my mommy is here."
"You've already been here three nights, sweetheart."
I looked at her. "She's been here longer."
Something moved across her face. Guilt maybe. Or something close to it.
"I'll be quiet," I told her. "I won't move. I won't ask for anything. I'll just sit here."
She shook her head slowly. And I understood from the way she did it that there was no version of this conversation where I got to stay.
She led me to the door. I think she believed someone would be outside waiting for me. A grandmother. A neighbour. Someone.
There was no one.
The city swallowed me the moment I stepped onto the street. Cars moved fast. People moved faster. Nobody looked down. Nobody noticed the small girl standing alone on the pavement with bleeding knees and no idea which direction was home.
But my feet started moving anyway.
I walked. And walked. And walked. Past yellow streetlights and dark shop windows and roads I didn't recognise. My legs ached. I tripped twice and hit the ground and got back up both times because there was no one to pick me up for me.
Somehow I found the building. I still don't know how. Maybe my feet remembered what my mind had given up trying to hold onto.
When I opened the apartment door everything looked exactly the same.
The table. The chairs. The small dim kitchen.
But the stillness inside was a different kind of stillness now. Before, the apartment was quiet because my mommy hadn't come home yet. Now it was quiet because I didn't know if she ever would.
The cupcakes were still on the table.
My birthday cupcakes. Dry and small and sad in a way that made my chest feel tight. I stood there and looked at them for a long time. Then I started to clean.
My mommy liked things tidy.
I washed the plates. I wiped the table. I folded the blankets and straightened the pillows and made everything look the way she liked it. I moved slowly and carefully, the way you do when you are trying to make something mean more than it does.
Maybe when she came home she would see I had been good. Maybe she would smile that tired smile she had, the one that didn't always reach her eyes but tried to. Maybe she would call me her little fairy.
But somewhere in the middle of folding a blanket I stopped.
Because I realised I didn't know how to get back to her.
I didn't know the street name. I didn't know the building. I didn't know any of the turns we had taken in the car that night. All I knew was that she was somewhere in this city, sleeping in a room with machines, and I was here, and there was too much distance between us and I didn't know how to close it.
I sat down on the floor.
And for a moment I let myself think the thought I had been pushing away since that red light first turned on.
*What if she doesn't wake up?*
What if she was lonely in there? What if she was calling for me and I couldn't hear her? What if she thought I had left her the same way everyone else in her life had?
And then a quieter thought. One I barely understood myself.
*Maybe if something happened to me too…*
*I could go where she was.*
I sat with that thought for a long time in the dark apartment. I didn't fully understand what it meant. I only knew it felt like the only solution my six-year-old mind could find to an impossible problem.
I needed to be where she was.
Whatever that took.
The next morning I stepped outside and followed the biggest road I could find. Cars rushed past. People moved around me without seeing me. The sun was already warm but I was cold in a way that had nothing to do with the weather.
My thoughts were somewhere else entirely. Somewhere behind a door with a red light above it.
I wasn't watching where I was walking.
My feet drifted off the pavement.
A horn tore through the air like something breaking.
Someone screamed.
And then the world tilted sideways and the ground came up fast and everything went very suddenly, completely dark.