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I keep walking. One foot in front of the other. The elevator doors open. Close. The floor numbers climb. My heart is beating so hard I can feel it in my teeth.

The doors open on the neurological floor, and the world narrows to a single point: get to Mom.

I don’t remember the walk from the elevator to the nurses’ station. One minute we’re stepping onto the floor, and the next I’m leaning against the counter with Carly’s hand on my back and Vinny already talking to someone in scrubs, his voice low and urgent.

“… DeLuca family,” he says. “We need to speak with the doctor immediately.”

I open my mouth to correct him because Mom isn’t a DeLuca. But before I can force the words out, the nurse looks over at me, and something shifts in her expression. Recognition, maybe. Or pity.

“Someone will be with you in just a moment,” she says. “Please, have a seat.”

I don’t want to sit. Sitting means waiting, and waiting means my brain has time to fill in the blanks with every worst-case scenario I’ve been stockpiling since the accident. But even while thinking that, my legs carry me over to a row of empty chairs.

Carly sits beside me, close enough that our shoulders touch.

The floor is quiet in that specific way hospital floors get when something’s wrong. Not the busy hum of a regular day, but the hushed, deliberate quiet of people moving with purpose behind closed doors.

A machine beeps somewhere down the hall. The sound crawls under my skin and stays there.

Vinny stands near the nurses’ station, arms crossed, watching the corridor. Every thirty seconds, he checks his phone. I know what he’s thinking. The five minutes have to be up.

“Tell me something,” I say to Carly. My voice sounds raw. “Anything. Talk.”

She doesn’t hesitate. “The first time Gio brought me flowers, he showed up with three dozen red roses but no vase. I had to put them in the kitchen sink.”

It works. For about four seconds, my brain latches onto the image of Gio standing awkwardly with an armful of roses. Then the machine beeps again, and I’m back in this chair, in this moment, waiting for someone to tell me how badly my world has broken.

A door opens down the hall. A woman in a white coat emerges, tablet in hand, and walks toward us. She’s older than I expected—fifties, maybe, with gray-streaked hair pulled back in a loose bun and glasses perched on her nose. She looks like someone who’s delivered a lot of bad news and learned how to do it without breaking people.

“Mrs. DeLuca?” Her eyes find mine.

I stand. Too fast. The room tilts, and Carly’s hand steadies my elbow.

“Yes. I’m Kira. How is my mom?”

“Let’s talk in the consult room.” She gestures to a small room off the main corridor, all beige walls and uncomfortable chairs.

“I want to see her first.”

“I understand. But I need a few minutes to explain what happened, and then you can see her. It’ll be easier if you have the context.”

Easy… nothing about this is easy. Still, I follow her into the room because it’s the fastest way to get to Mom. Even though the doctor offers me a seat, I don’t take it.

“Your mother suffered a seizure,” the doctor says. Her voice is calm, measured. The kind of voice designed not to scare people. “The nursing staff was with her when it began. They administered medication immediately, which stopped the seizure within two minutes. She’s been stable since.”

Seizure. The word echoes in my head.

I’ve read about seizures so I know what they can mean. Progression. Decline. The beginning of the end. God, I wish my brain wasn’t immediately going to the worst place possible.

“What caused it?” My voice comes out steadier than I feel.

“That’s what we’re working to determine. There are several possible triggers…”

She keeps talking, but the words blur together, clinical and distant, like she’s reading from a textbook instead of talking about my mom.

“… So while it’s concerning, it’s not necessarily indicative of a larger decline. These events can be isolated.”

“Is she going to die?” The question cuts through everything else. Sharp. Desperate.