The structural collapse of the thing she had been holding together for an hour — the waiting room chairs and the dead phone and the aching jaw and the mascara and the parking lot and Vikram's car driving away and the voice she had heard through the toilet wall saying 'she was never enough.'
It broke.
She moved.
The pregnant-woman-moving-toward-something quality — the careful urgency of a body that could not be reckless but was doing its fastest version of not-reckless. The three steps from the door to the side of his bed.
She bent.
She hugged him.
The full-body hug of someone who had been waiting for permission to stop holding things together and had just received it in the form of two words — 'what happened' — said in a warm voice that had been asking her questions all evening without weaponizing her answers.
