The rain had not stopped for three days.
It wasn’t dramatic rain, not the kind that lashes sideways and sends people running for shelter. It was the slow, relentless kind that seeped into everything, a constant gray curtain between the world and the sky. From the hospital waiting room, I watched the drops bead on the long pane of glass, gather themselves into trembling little bodies, and then slide down in wandering paths.
Sometimes they met another drop halfway.
Sometimes they merged and fell faster. Sometimes they hesitated, clinging to the glass until gravity finally insisted.
After a while they all blurred together, streaks of water on a dirty window.
I realized I’d been staring so long my eyes hurt. I blinked, and the room swam back into focus: the stiff plastic chairs, the flickering soda machine, the muted television looping the same bad daytime show.
A child whined somewhere behind me; a nurse laughed softly at something a colleague said.
The air smelled like bleach and microwaved food.
My life felt like those raindrops—shapeless, uncontrollable, slipping away in directions I hadn’t chosen.
Two floors above, machines were breathing for my brother because his lungs had forgotten how.
I checked my phone for the hundredth time. No new messages. No call from the doctor.
No miraculous change.
Just the same photo lighting up my screen when it went idle: Tommy standing in our mother’s backyard, grinning with a burger in one hand and a beer in the other, a ridiculous novelty apron tied around his waist.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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