When I’m incognito, I could be anyone. Anyone but Stassi Hamilton. I don’t remove the sunglasses or the baseball cap as I reach for the glass doors of Ridgefield Medical. I swing the door open, and keep my head down as I walk down the short hallway that bleeds into a lobby. I bypass the information desk and press on until I reach an elevator down a narrow hall.

I press the button marked with an upward arrow. As soon as the doors open, I step into the elevator and turn around just in time to see a tall young man join me in the elevator right before the doors come to a close. He’s outfitted in a blue pair of scrubs. His name is Trent, and I’ve known him since I was seven. We were neighbors for years until he moved away sophomore year. Now he’s back in town with a beautiful wife and an education, and he’s my only access to the boy I sacrificed everything for.

“You’re late,” he huffs under his breath and cranes his head to face me. “We don’t have long.”

“Sorry about that.” I cross my arms over each other as the elevator begins to rise. “It’s been a rough day.”

“I couldn’t tell.” A warm smile hitches across his lips and he leans his back against the elevator, with his palms gripped tight around the steel bars. “Once we get up here, you have five minutes and then I’m pulling the plug.”

I look to him with a harrowing look in my eyes as my stomach floods with despair.

“No.” He sees the writing on my face and moves to correct himself. “That was a poor choice of words.”

“I thought you meant…”

“His parents just phoned the front desk. They’ll be here soon.” He glances down at the watch on his wrist and initiates a deep, nervous sigh. “You know I could lose my job, right?”

“I could come back tomorrow.”

“No.” He waves me off with a forced smile. “They’re terrible people.” The elevator comes to a sudden halt and the hydraulic doors slam open. His palm lands upon my back and he guides me out of the steel enclosure and down a hallway. “Three knocks and you come out immediately.” We reach the end of the hallway, where two rooms are placed adjacent to each other on opposite sides of a corner. “Don’t make me drag you out of there.”

“Thank you, Trent.” I place my palm on his shoulder before pushing my way through the wooden door, and closing it gently behind me.

Nathan lies in the bed, with a ventilator pumping air into his lungs. The room is cool and chilly and I wrap my arms around my body to warm myself, but it doesn’t seem to help much at all.

A decorative blue gown is draped over his thin body, peeking out above a plain white blanket. His dark hair is pushed back, but rebellious strands hang across his forehead. He’s clean-shaven like he always seems to be, but this isn’t the way I remember him.

He used to smile. A tall kid with a laugh that could light up a classroom, even though he was far from being a member of the popular crowd. Now, all there is, is silence. His hair was dyed, sometimes a different color each day of the week. Now, he sports the hair he was born with. The same hair that was always too simple for him. He was a colorful kid with a colorful wardrobe, and now the closet adjacent to his bed houses only one pair of jeans, a tee, and a hoodie.

The noise of the various machines is enough to drive me crazy. The ventilator huffs like well-oiled hydraulics. Green and red lines chase after each other on a set of monitors, with head-splitting beeps once each color passes an arbitrary finish line and begins anew.

The faded yellow curtains are drawn shut, wavering in the breeze of the air conditioning unit parked underneath a long window that spans the length of the room.

I stand at the foot of his bed, trying in vain to push away the thoughts of guilt. As a sane human being, I know there’s nothing more I could have done to prevent this. All evidence points to the narrative that he’d be dead without my intervention, but evidence is oftentimes muddled by human contamination, and never surrenders to matters of the heart.

Maybe he’d be better off dead, rather than lying in a hospital bed for eternity waiting for the impossible day in which he’ll wake up. If I wouldn’t have jumped into his car, Nathan wouldn’t be in this condition, and I wouldn’t have lost my child. If I could build a time machine and go back, I would. That’s not to say I’d change anything, because the truth is I don’t know if I’d have the strength to change a damn thing. I’d still be there at the end of the game, watching him as he stumbled into his car, and the choice to not intervene isn’t one I can see playing out, because back then I cared too much, which ultimately led to my demise. Now, I care too little and I honestly don’t know which one is worse.

I remove my hat and sunglasses, and place them on the sink. I work up the strength to swing to the side of the bed to take his hand in mine and hold him tight, to pray with him in silent solidarity, to let him know someone still cares, to let him know that somebody will never give up on him the way so many supposed adults in his life had.

In my wildest imagination, I’ve seen this scene play out a thousand times on the silver screen. All it takes is a gentle squeeze of the hand, or a beautiful admittance of love. Fingers twitch. Eyes open. There’s a happily ever after.

But his fingers don’t move and his eyes don’t open.

The hydraulics pump.

The monitors beep.

Nurses and staff bustle down the hall outside the door.

“You need to wake up,” I whisper and caress his forehead with one hand. “You need to wake up to prove these people wrong. They say you’re never going to wake up.” I grip my fingers tighter around his hand. “So wake the hell up.”

No response. There never is.

“I’m tired of fighting, Nathan.” I pull away from him and take a seat in an uncomfortable chair beside the bed. “But I fight because there’s still one thing in this world worth holding onto. That’s you.”

The ugly truth is that I’d probably be six feet under if it weren’t for the imaginary story in my head; a story which ends like it does in the movies. He’s not my lover, nor has he ever been despite the town whispers. But I feel connected to him the way a parent is connected eternally to a child. I remember the first time someone told me I should become a teacher. I was in the seventh grade, and I was more focused on helping a fellow student pass their math exam than attending a mid-afternoon school dance.

Two things have changed since then; I hate math, and I don’t have that compassion—that internal want and desire to help others—in me anymore.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this.” I bow my head down and cradle my face with clammy hands before rising back to my feet. I can’t stay in one place. My nerves are too frayed, always afraid that someone could come through that door at any given second. “You’re supposed to be somebody to someone in this world, and I wish like hell you could be. I wish a lot of things. I wish that you were given a better hand in life, because you deserved it.”

Knock.

Knock.

Knock.

After the third knock, I know my brief time is up, but I’m not ready to leave yet. “You’re going to get better because you have to. Do you hear me? You’re going to wake up because your story is far from over. You’re going to live a long, happy life, and you’re going to look back at this damn town the same way I used to. It made you stronger, but it was never home.” I brace my hands on the railing of the bed. “It can’t be, because people like you and I don’t belong here. We never did.”

Knock.

Knock.

Knock.

My eyes shift to the door, and then back down at Nathan one last time. In these rushed moments, I become unraveled with the first tear marching down my cheek. My palm shakes, and my lips purse. “The strongest act of revenge is proving to the world that you’re strong when they’ve always called you weak.”

Tears begin to well in the corners of my eyes, pooling at the creases. I adjust the blanket on his cold body, and hunch over his bed. I plant a soft kiss against his forehead. “It gets better, Nathan.”

When I finally break away from him, I do so in haste. I run the back of my palm against my eyes, erasing the tears, but they’re just like chalk on a green chalkboard. I position my hat over my head and slide the sunglasses over my eyes. I pull the door open and Trent grapples my arm, twisting my body so that we face away from the way we came in.

“I told you three knocks,” he growls against my ear as he guides me down the hallway. I peer over my shoulder as Trent ushers me down the corridor to see Nathan’s parents, wearing an obtuse shade of grief on their faces. They have no right to grieve.

Their actions, and the actions of my husband, together created the perfect storm. Their choices snowballed into the ultimate tragedy where all four of us lost a child, and the two of us who were innocents caught in the crossfire are the ones who lost everything.

Why didn’t we die? It would have been easier. Right?