"Mom, calm down."

She paced the hallway, her fingers twisting around each other as we waited, and made me more nervous than necessary.

Her eyes focused on the white walls as if she thought they would inch towards her with the single motive of crushing her.

"This is me being calm," she shot back, the faintest trace of annoyance in her voice.

It had seemed like years came and passed as we waited for the ambulance to come and get Marge, filled with random snippets of memories of her daughter. "She was a swimmer, you know? I never did make it to any of her meets" and "I missed a surprise party I threw for her once. How does that even happen?" and "Her hair never grew past her shoulders—sort of like you, Kelly." Each thought seemed as disconnected as possible from the previous one as she tried not to slur her words and prove she was not having a stroke.

We were in the waiting room now after her doctor reassured us that it was probably a mini-stroke.

The jacket had come in handy, after all. The waiting room, and much of the hospital, was freezing. It probably guaranteed death to anyone who would have otherwise survived.

I rubbed my hands together and pulled my sleeves down to warm up my fingers to recover some of the lost functioning.

I split up my mental energy between trying to remain unbothered by Miles sitting on the chair next to me and keeping an eye on Mom. Her anxious pacing had caused two accidents already that involved spilling coffee and knocking down medical files.

We hadn't said a word to each other since whatever it was that happened earlier. It was partly because I could still feel the warmth of his hand on my cheek, and I didn't want my voice to betray that I was replaying everything with a better ending this time in which my muscles responded to my commands.

"I'm going to get some coffee," Mom said when she had attracted exasperated glares from everyone else in the waiting room with her pacing. "Do you guys need something? It might be a long night."

"No," I told her. Any more fidgety, and I'd need to see one of the doctors around here for myself. "But I can walk with you if you'd like." I was itching to leave this seat with a good excuse to avoid Miles for the rest of my life.

Mom shook her head and backed away. "Stay here in case the doctor comes back with an update."

My eyes tracked her down the hall even after she disappeared from view. I didn't want to allow myself to focus too much on the fact that Miles and I were alone again.

Much wiser this time, I was mindful to keep my hands in my lap to make sure I knew what each finger was doing at all times, so I wouldn't be caught off-guard when I found them brushing his arm or something without warning me.

From the corner of my eyes, I could tell he looked as normal as usual as if nothing out of the norm had happened. His foot tapped an uneven rhythm against the floor and kept me more on edge than I already felt.

"Well—" I heard him say as he broke the silence we had orchestrated and shifted in his seat to face me.

"We don't have to talk about it," I cut him off as something too similar to flames rushed to my cheeks.

"Good. Though if we were to talk about it," he said before I could breathe out in relief, "I would say that I had been wanting to do that for a very long time."

Miles Whitman truly had no rival when it came to how easily he could get under my skin.

My eyes narrowed at him, and I wished I had something—anything—in my resources that could wipe away that smile from his face.

"We are so not having this conversation," I said, but the only effect this seemed to have on him was to broaden his smile and cause the intolerable brown eyes to squint.

The people waiting around us and the doctors and nurses rushing by the waiting room back and forth to tend to whoever paged them felt a world away.

"Which one? The one where we act as if we didn't just kiss or the one where we pretend that we don't feel anything for each other?"

I gaped at his words—he hadn't even whispered them, which earned us a few smiles from our closest neighbors.

He held up his hands to feign innocence at my reaction. "Don't mind me. I'm just trying to kill time."

Time wasn't the only thing that would suffer death threats if he continued to speak like that and stare at me as though he could see more of me than I could.

What did he know about my feelings, anyway?

I didn't have any if I were to believe Thomas the day we broke up or Mr. Crawford's notes about my writing. Where did his smug confidence, that he had me figured out, come from when I knew myself about as much as any stranger did?

Mom returned with a small paper cup of coffee and a new companion. She did not mention the scowls I was shooting at Miles to counter his impassive expression.

"This is Marge's daughter, Rachel," Mom said, guiding the middle-aged woman to a seat. "I ran into her in the elevator."

Only then did the little details about the woman spring into sight. She had the same mysterious dark eyes Crazy Marge had and a similar head tilt as she observed our little group. Only her dark clothes contrasted the flowery clothing her mother always wore whenever I saw her.

I barely caught the scoff in her voice before she spoke. "Her daughter? I guess I am."

Her voice was light and childlike and didn't match her bloodshot eyes. I had a hard time picturing her as the girl who plastered neon stars all around the apartment.

Mom did not seem to catch the resentment in Rachel's tone. "The last update we received about your mother's condition was that her stroke was quite mild."

Rachel nodded and glanced at Miles and me. "Are you my mom's friends?" she asked, disbelief scrunching up her face at the odd age range of her mom's choice of friends.

"Kelly and Marge are neighbors. I'm just visiting." Mom looked down at the small cup she held in her hands and took a sip of it. "Tastes like water," she mumbled with a grimace.

"So, how did it happen?" Rachel asked. "Was she trying to complete the 5K run again?"

Mom played with the now-empty paper cup, molding it into a square without spilling the drops on the sterile flooring.

"We were talking about all sorts of things," she said, vague, bringing a frown to my face. "You know, lifetime regrets."

She looked at Rachel then at me for a brief moment before her eyes dropped to her lap. I assumed I came up in their conversation at some point. And I didn't think I wanted to know why.

I felt Miles's gaze following us, and I wondered what he saw when he looked at Mom and me. We were not exactly the cover picture for the complete transparency magazine. So far from it.

Mom held back hundreds of unsaid thoughts that I knew she would never share. I had come to have peace with that—relied on it, even.

The same doctor we had talked to earlier came out of the room again, an hour later, which was time I spent sneaking glances at Rachel and dodging Miles.

"We're still waiting on some test results," the doctor announced, glancing at us from above his thin glasses, "but she seems as well as we could expect her to be after the mini-stroke. Only her family's allowed to see her at the moment."

"Thanks for waiting with me," Rachel told us, "I'll update you on her state."

She wrote down Mom's number and followed the doctor out of the room.

"We should probably head back then," Mom said and released a breath that seemed to take the tension off her shoulders. "Rachel's here. I didn't expect her to come. Marge should be fine now."

I rose from the seat I had been stuck in for most of the night. My feet were only too excited to touch solid ground again.

"You didn't have to stay," I told Miles as the three of us walked down the stairs to avoid the crowd that waited in front of the elevator.

"Why didn't you say so earlier?" He joked and seemed content when a tired smile formed on my face.

"Thanks for being here."

He stared at me, his expression switching from playful to earnest in a blink that sent my blood into a frenzy. "Anything for you."

➷➷➷

After a trip to the bathroom to wash away the last bit of embarrassment mixed with stress from my face, I entered my room again. I was too far in by the time my ears picked up on the sobs. It was too late for me to escape with feigned ignorance.

I remained where I was and debated what words fit best to appease her. "Mom, the doctor said she's going to be okay," I told her when I caught a glimpse of tears I had never seen on her face before.

It made no sense because Mom was all about logic. There was no reason for her to trust her concern over an expert's diagnosis.

She turned around, away from me, so that she could hide her face from me. If it were that simple—if I thought she didn't need me—I would have sprinted out of the room without even considering it. But ignoring her tears would bother me more than staying would.

As I walked into the room to join her on my bed, my feet caught on to the sleeping mat I had once again forgotten to put away, and I tripped, falling by Mom's feet where a tarnished gold necklace had just slipped from her fingers.

I didn't move—I couldn't. The oxygen flow to my brain stopped for a moment when I recalled the memories attached to that necklace.

"I'm not crying about Marge," I heard her say when she noticed the recognition on my face.

She reached out and pulled me onto the bed while I continued to stare at the jewelry that rested on my palm.

"Do you remember it?" she asked, and her voice rang out hoarse and weak at the same time.

I nodded, and in a second, everything made sense again. Mom's tears. The nightmares. The screams.

I didn't expect to manage to make a sound, but a name I hadn't pronounced in forever while conscious slipped past my lips too many years later.

"It's Grace's."