Make Mommy disappear too.
I turned slowly toward the clinic window.
Andrés’s car was parked directly outside.
Diane sat in the passenger seat.
No cane.
No grimace of pain.
No swollen knee stretched carefully in front of her like she had done at my dining table for three weeks.
She sat upright.
Calm.
Smiling.
Like a woman who had already rehearsed how this would end.
Andrés got out first.
He looked angry.
Not worried.
Not confused.
Angry.
That was the moment something inside me cracked in a way that could never be repaired.
Because my daughter was inside a doctor’s office, pale and drugged from pills she should never have touched, and my husband’s first instinct was not to run to her.
It was to come for me.
The doctor stepped between me and the door.
