STELLA SAT UP, HER heart pounding, her breathing labored. Everything was in black and white, like she was trapped inside an old TV program, but she blinked hard, then shut and opened her eyes again, and colors snapped on, bright and shiny, and there was Simon, only it wasn’t Simon. He was different somehow, and she couldn’t figure out why or how. Machines beeped beside her and she tried to lift her hand to touch him, but she couldn’t. Did he always have those streaks of gray in his hair? Was that scar on the bottom of his neck new?
“Shhh, sleeping beauty,” he said, and then she recognized the voice, the one she had held on to all through her long sleep. “I’ve been waiting and waiting for this,” he said. “You can’t imagine—”
His eyes were brimming with tears, and she looked at him, astounded. He wasn’t a crier.
“Simon,” she said. Her voice sounded funny, like scraping her nails against concrete. “My voice—” she said.
“That’s from the breathing tube. It’ll come back.”
“What?” she said, alarmed. She tried to cough to clear her throat, twisting the sheets in her hand. The blue hospital gown rustled against her; the machine clicked and then stopped. She tried to hoist herself up, but her arms and legs were noodles. “What happened?” she said. “What am I doing here?”
Simon pulled up a chair and moved as close to the bed as he could. He grabbed her hand, and she felt a shock of cold. “Do you remember?” he said.
She shook her head. “It’s foggy.”
“You’ve been in a coma,” he said.
The air grew clammy around her.
“You were in a coma,” he repeated.
She felt his fingers stroking her hand. Stop, she wanted to say. Stop. Stop. Every time he touched her, she felt sparks. “Since February. It’s April now,” he said.
“I don’t believe you,” she said. He was talking to her slowly, the way he would to a child. And then she thought, Oh God, what have I missed? Could this possibly be true?
“How?” she said. Why did people go into coma? She used to know that, but now she remembered nothing.
“All that matters is that you’re okay.”
“Am I okay?”
“You’re awake and talking and you know who I am. That’s okay as far as I’m concerned.”
“I want to know what happened. Please. You have to tell me.”
Simon’s grip tightened on her hand. “Tell me,” she begged. “You have to.” He shook his head. “Someone else will tell me, then. I’ll ask everybody if you don’t.” She knew she sounded ridiculous.
Simon looked unsettled. “We were partying. Remember the way we used to when we were young?” Simon said.
Stella shut her eyes. She could remember dancing with Simon in the kitchen, but it was morning and they were in their pajamas. She had another flash, a party full of musicians, but she had stayed by herself in a corner, trying to attract Simon’s attention because she wanted to go home.
“I don’t . . . I can’t remember.”
“We were drinking wine.”
Wine, she thought, and a tartness filled her mouth.
“We both took a pill.”
“A pill?” An image flashed. A suitcase. No, two suitcases in their apartment, both of them open like mouths trying to tell her something, if only she could understand the language. If only the image would stay in her mind instead of fading out. Drinking. She remembered drinking, but it was someone else’s memory, not hers. Someone else was gulping down wine, reaching for a pill. She wouldn’t have done that. She slid down into the sheets, tugging her hand free. “That’s impossible,” she said. Talking to him felt like a garbled phone conversation, with echoes.
Simon leaned closer to her. She could smell his aftershave. Was that pine? Or something oceany? Had he ever worn aftershave at all? “You’re alive and I’m here with you. That’s what matters,” he said.
An image sparked. That guitar case. Stickers all over it from every place Simon had ever been, like they were gold stars for being so good, so talented. They were supposed to go to California. She remembered that now. Had she wanted to go? Why would they be drinking? Were they celebrating? Is that the way they celebrated? His band had a chance at something, she remembered that, too. “California.” The word had a metallic taste on her tongue.
“No, honey. There’s no California. The band went. I stayed. I’m driving a Lyft now.”
It made her impossibly sad, Simon not going to California with his band. He had dreamed so much about that, had wanted it so much. She thought about Simon driving a Lyft. Having to be somewhere, having to listen to other people and take them where they wanted to go, when he was always the driver and navigator of everything. “But who are you playing music with, then?” She couldn’t imagine him without his guitar.
“Your mom’s here,” he told her.
“My mom? Where?” She looked around wildly, wanting to see her mom, to hold her hand. “Where is she?”
“I called her. When you first got sick. She’s staying at the apartment. She’ll be here later.”
Stella tried to remember sensing her mom in this room, hearing her voice here in the hospital, but her mind went blank. Her mother here? And living in their apartment? Stella looked at Simon in confusion.
“Libby’s here all the time. You have a whole team of doctors, too.”
“Doctors? What doctors?”
He touched her toes, which was a little disconcerting. He gave them a wiggle. “It won’t be forever,” he said.
“What won’t?” she said. Was he talking about her mom staying here or about her being in the hospital?
Simon didn’t answer. He drew an extra blanket over her, and she threw it off. She didn’t want to be tucked in, held in place. She wanted that warm buoyant feeling again, the touch of the colors she had seen. “I was floating,” she said. “There were so many colors, Simon, it was sort of amazing—”
“What?”
“I can still see them. Right in this room. If I try really hard, I can feel them.”
He shook his head. “No, no, honey. It’s probably the drugs that did that—”
“No. No, it isn’t.”
He patted her hand awkwardly. “They’ll wear off.”
“And then what?”
“Then we’ll wait and see and watch you get better and better until you’re your old self.”
Her old self. What was her old self? It was all muddied in her mind.
We can’t remember the future, Stephen Hawking had once said, but she felt as if she could, because time was all mixed up. She saw her mom, so vivid and alive, but then she vanished. She saw Simon, but it was Simon when he was twenty-two and cocky and full of hope. He was skinny and bouncing up and down on his high-top sneakers.
“Is there a mirror?” she asked, and Simon shook his head. At least she could see her hands, her body. She held up her fingers, and to her surprise, her nails, which she always bit, which always shamed her, had grown long and beautiful. They were painted a dusty rose. “Oh, will you look at that,” she said in wonder.
“Joyce did that. She thought you’d somehow know. She made up your whole face.”
“Joyce? She was here?” She gestured. “Please can I see a mirror?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
He was gone for a moment and then came back with a pocket mirror. But he kept standing there, not giving it to her. “Are you sure you want to do this?” he said, and she reached for the mirror and turned it to her face.
It was and it wasn’t her. She moved her eyes and watched them move in the mirror. “I have yellow hair?” she said.
“Always.”
“Really? Always? And it’s curly?”
“Is it ever.”
Stella was skeptical. How could this woman be her? The face in the mirror was tired. She remembered this Daphne du Maurier story she had once read, a story that had terrified her. A woman was in the hospital, and after her operation, she saw all the doctors as having the heads of insects or animals. When she told them, they said, “We’ll fix it.” They put her under again, and when she woke up, the doctors looked normal. It wasn’t until she was handed a mirror that she saw that she had the head of a cow.
“Can I keep this mirror?” she asked.
“Sleep,” he told her, pocketing the mirror. “I’ll be back later.”
BUT HE DIDN’T come back, or maybe he did. Maybe her mom did. Or her friends. She checked her nails: the polish was a little chipped. She looked around the room because people usually brought things to people in the hospital. She took inventory. Chair. Water pitcher. Magazine. There was nothing new, nothing special. Or was there? She felt as if she had had that one bright moment with Simon, in which she understood where she was, and she was so happy to see him. If she didn’t quite get the why and how of it all, at least she didn’t feel as detached as she did now. Time knotted on her and looped around. She couldn’t tell if it was day or night because one second things grew darker, but in the next moment she was blinded by light.
Doctors came in and out. She remembered a cold stethoscope on her chest, questions she couldn’t answer because as soon as they asked them, she forgot what they were. Once, she remembered seeing a group of med students standing in a circle around her bed, a doctor she didn’t know talking to them. “I’m not here,” she said.
“She’s having visions,” the doctor said to the med students, who all stared at Stella and then hung back, like they were afraid to catch what she had. Then they were all gone.
Night came, and she was terrified because everything seemed to be slowing down. The lights dimmed. There was less commotion in the hall. Only sometimes did she hear a patient crying, a man’s voice saying the same name, like the sob of a cat. Diane, Diane. But then she swore she heard something, like the stamp of a boot, and then the guy stopped calling, and she didn’t know if it was because Diane had appeared or the patient had fallen asleep or was just tired of crying. There was the pad of shoes on the floor. Nurses, orderlies. Only occasionally a doctor. Out in the hall, she could hear two nurses talking. “And after all that, he was a lousy lay,” said one. Stella recognized the voice. Betty Rosman, a redhead single mom, who was always sneaking breaks to have another cigarette.
“You know how I tell who’s going to be good in bed?” another voice said. “They have to cup my face when they kiss me. It’s a little thing, but, boy, does it count for me.”
She felt an electric surge. Libby! That was Libby’s voice. She knew what that felt like, too, having your face cupped for a kiss. Simon used to do that, but now, since she had awakened, he just gave her gentle brushes with his lips, like he was afraid any greater pressure would make her shatter.
“Jaxon was a lousy kisser,” Libby said. “That should have told me everything I needed to know about him.”
Stella remembered Jaxon. A scientist, no, an architect. That was it. She felt as if she had won a prize, grabbing that memory.
The voices blurred and grew faint. Come back. Come back. And then they were gone. Everything seemed to be moving at warp speed, so fast, images came at her in blurs, so intense, that she wasn’t sure if she had entered another world. She was skiing down a blindingly white mountain, pitched so sharply, she was nearly horizontal. It was so freezing that she felt her bones might snap off, but she liked this cold, no, she loved it. She wanted more. She had never even considered skiing, had always been too conscious of all the ways you could hurt yourself, breaking a leg, snapping an arm, or even ramming into a tree and dying just like Sonny Bono had. Organ donors—that’s what the nurses called people who were daredevils, who laughed at helmets, at safety belts or harnesses, who ended up dead on a gurney with viable young hearts and lungs and corneas that would continue to lie in someone else’s body. But here, in her dream, if it was a dream, she zoomed around and over moguls, she jumped high into the hard blue sky, flying, landing even faster, never stopping. Never wanting to. She zipped around a curve, she slashed through the white powder, her breath coming in pants, huh huh huh, and there it was, a jump ahead of her, rising up into the mountains with a thrilling loop in the middle, and she couldn’t help grinning as she tore through it. Breathe, she heard someone say, a voice swirling around her with the snow, and she did, whirling around, upside down and then right side up again, her skis cutting into the air. She was triumphant with joy, with the wind whooshing like music about her. She was laughing and so alive that she swore she could feel every cell inside her vibrating, and then someone was shaking her and she bolted awake. Her eyes flashed open.
She was alone in this hospital bed, rigid with confusion. No one else was in the room. Or if they had been, they were gone now. The snow and ice were gone, too, the skis, the cold hard bite of the air. No. No, no, no. Come back. Her face felt chapped. She searched the room for snow. She didn’t know which life was real, but somehow the one she had awakened to felt like the biggest disappointment. Stella, Scaredy Cat Stella, who always wore bike helmets, who wouldn’t ride in a cab even on a rainy day if it didn’t have a working seatbelt, who yearned for everything to be calm and still. She had almost completed the high jump, and all she wanted now was to go for it again.
The hospital felt asleep, but she couldn’t be still. She felt like she almost made sense of herself now. She leaned over and looked for something to occupy her, a magazine maybe, a book. She squinted harder. There was a pad of paper on her nightstand, a pen, and she grabbed for them. Maybe she could write what she remembered, and that way she wouldn’t forget it again. She knew the paper and pen were real, but she wasn’t so sure about her memories.
She couldn’t get her mind to work right. She wrote down I was on a mountain, and then, without thinking, she began drawing circles, over and over, faster and faster, as if her pen itself were skiing, and the more she drew, the better she felt, pulling into a trance. She covered one whole side of the page, then flipped it over. It reminded her of something, this frantic drawing. Who was it, what was his name, who drew like this? That nastily funny comic-book artist, the one who drew horsey-looking women with big leg-of-lamb thighs, the one with the schizophrenic brother who killed himself? R. Crumb. That was it. He had a brother, Charles, who tranced out when he drew, who made magnificent illustrations using circles, covering every bit of white space because all that blankness hurt him, and gradually his circles grew into people, into stories, into a life he could manage to live in.
She was on her fifth sheet of paper when a nurse she didn’t recognize came in, all white clogs and blue scrubs.
“Well, what’s this?” the nurse said, and then Stella looked down and saw the paper spread across her bed, the sheet in her lap. She put the pen down, panting. “I don’t know,” she said.
“That’s enough, then,” the nurse said. “You need to rest.” But as soon as she took the pen from Stella’s hand, Stella’s fingers kept moving, making loop after loop in the air. “Sleep now,” the nurse said, gathering up all the pages and stacking them neatly on the nightstand. Stella grabbed at her sleeve.
“Please, can you ask Simon to bring me paper and pens?” she begged.
“Sleep now,” said the nurse.
“Tell him. Please tell him,” Stella said.
“I will.”
Stella shut her eyes. She dreamed of circles, spirals whirling faster and faster.
THE NEXT DAY, Simon brought her six notebooks in rainbow colors and colored pens in varying thicknesses, and as soon as she saw them, she felt dizzy with pleasure. She held out her arms and hugged them to her. “Thank you,” she said, almost breathless with excitement. “Thank you, thank you.”
“Are you writing your memoir?” he said, grinning, and she ignored him because how could she explain something she didn’t understand herself?
Stella looked around. “My mom, is she really here?”
He gave her a funny look. “She was here this morning. She sat by your bed for a long time.”
“No. No, she wasn’t.”
“The two of you talked.”
Stella slumped back down into the bed, shivering.
“She’ll be here later,” he told her. “She wants to come again this evening. Your friends want to come, too, but I don’t want to tire you out. Would that be okay?”
Her friends had been here? She couldn’t remember. Libby was her friend, Stella thought. She had heard Libby talking, and she knew as a doctor, Libby would visit her every day. Debra, another nurse, used to go out for Cinnabons for both of them when a day would start to sour. Her mind shuttered. Surely she must have more friends. Maybe she’d know them when she saw them.
“Is it okay, you and my mom together in our apartment?” She couldn’t remember if the two of them got along, if they liked each other.
“Really, it’s fine,” he said.
She opened one notebook, grabbing the first pen, a purple one, and began to draw. “Is that supposed to be me?” he asked jokingly, but she kept drawing circles and circles and circles. The more she drew, the better she felt. By the time Simon was ready to leave, she had filled half of one notebook.
“Is this weird, what I’m doing?” she asked him when she finally put the pen down. She felt exhilarated, as if she had run a marathon.
“Does it feel weird?”
“I don’t know. Except I want to do it. I like to do it.”
“Then it’s not weird. And I’ll bring you more notebooks,” he said.
He leaned down to kiss her, a peck on her cheek, and then he was gone and it was just her again.
At night, Libby came in to check on her. As soon as Libby walked in the room, Stella felt the air grow warmer, safer. She looked up and there was Libby carefully scanning Stella’s notebooks. Stella swore that Libby looked as if she had been crying, but when she asked her, Libby took her hand. “I’m just glad you’re awake and back with us.”
Libby put the notebooks down. “Well,” Libby said, her voice trailing off, “you’ve been busy.”
“Why do you think I need to do this?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Libby said, and then she bent over Stella and shone a light into her eyes.
“Will I stop?”
Libby clicked off her light. “I don’t know that either,” Libby said. “But here’s something interesting that I’ll remind you about. You’re a nurse. I know you know this. We’re always re-creating ourselves. Every seven to ten years, most of our cells replace themselves. Some cells do it even quicker. Isn’t that something amazing?”
“I don’t know,” Stella said. “I just feel so weird.”
“I know you do.”
“Did you see my mom?”
Libby’s face softened. “I did. Just for a bit. I like your mom. She brought cookies for the staff. Good cookies, too, from a bakery.”
A memory floated into Stella’s mind, her mother bringing her elementary-school teachers elaborate holiday gifts, hoping they would make the teachers like Stella more. It always bothered Stella that her mother somehow thought her teachers didn’t like her enough. Stella always wished the presents had been for her.
“Did you see Simon? Is he okay?”
Libby smoothed Stella’s sheet, the blanket. “He’s fine,” she said.
“I know you don’t like him, you don’t approve, but—”
“Stella, don’t be silly.”
“What’s going to happen to me?” Stella whispered. She felt Libby stalling. “Come on, this is me. Tell me the truth.”
“There are a lot of maybes,” Libby said finally. “You may get dizzy spells. You’re most certainly going to feel weird. You might be nauseated.” Libby sat down on the bed and took Stella’s hand. “Honey,” she said, then stopped.
“What?” Stella said. “Tell me. What?”
“You might experience personality changes. Learning disabilities. You won’t be the same, Stella. Maybe not for a while. Maybe not ever. Like I told you, the brain rewires itself. That’s how it heals. We just have to wait and see.”
“How long do we have to wait?”
“Honey, I don’t know. You’re going to have some tests. You have a whole team of doctors here, me, a neurologist, a physical therapist. We just don’t know how things are going to play out. We have to wait and see.”
Stella blinked. She tugged back her hand. Wait and see was what you told patients when you had no idea. Wait and see was when you didn’t like the answer. “Why am I drawing like this?” Stella asked, and Libby shrugged.
“I don’t know,” Libby said. “You told me your mom was a designer. Who knows, maybe it’s those genes finally expressing themselves.”
“My mom made beautiful, elaborate dresses. These are just scribbles.”
Libby was quiet for a moment. “I know, honey,” she said finally.
“Will it go away?”
Libby shrugged.
“Can you go now?” Stella said quietly, and Libby nodded.
Libby left the room, and as soon as she was gone, Stella reached for her pen and notebook again and began to draw even more frantically than before.
SHE WAS DREAMING. Her mother was sitting beside her, beside Simon, and her mom was telling her stories about her childhood, but the language was too garbled and she only caught a few words. Sixth grade. Backyard. Your father. “Mom,” she tried to say, “Mom,” and then her eyes opened and her mother was there and Stella reached for her arm and there was real flesh. She started to cry. “You came!” Stella said. “You came to me!”
“You’re my daughter. Of course I came. I was always here, darling. Simon and I both come every day.”
“Tell me. Tell me about you,” Stella said. Her mother’s hair was short and white, and she was in an old T-shirt and sweatpants, something in the past Bette would never have been caught wearing in public. “You look so different—” Stella said.
“It’s me, honey,” Bette said.
Her mother told her about the flight from Spain, about the turbulence that made the woman next to her scream out loud. She told her how she had painted her apartment in Spain the most lovely shade of deep green, just like the sea, just like her dress. “You’ll both visit me soon,” her mother said, and it made Stella sad, because she didn’t know yet if she could get out of the bed, let alone cross an ocean.
She couldn’t recall with any certainty if Simon and her mom had liked each other, but they seemed to now. Simon stayed close to Bette. When Bette shivered, he got an extra blanket and gently wrapped it around her. And when Bette and Simon left, Bette leaned over to Stella. “You have such a good man,” she whispered.
THE DOCTORS TOLD Stella that recovery would be gradual. “How gradual?” she asked, but they never really told her anything other than “We’ll see.”
There were more tests. More physical therapy and MRIs and CAT scans. Debra came by with a Cinnabon. “Sense memory,” she said, and she was right, because Stella remembered sitting in the nurses’ station, gorging on the icing, her favorite part. She took a nibble, but it didn’t taste right, so she politely took another and then set it down.
Most of the friends who came to visit were nurses. Stella had spent most of her time in the hospital, and when she wasn’t there she was with Simon. But as soon as she thought that, she wondered why she and Simon didn’t have mutual friends anymore, why they never really went out with other couples. “We’re busy people,” Simon told her, and then he picked up the Cinnabon she couldn’t eat and polished it off.
April turned into May and Stella was getting stronger. It took her a single week and the help of one burly physical therapist named Lou Rodriguez before she could walk from one end of the corridor to the other, shuffling like an old woman at first, then walking slowly, and finally, moving with some grace and just a little speed, and it bothered her how amazed the nurses were, the doctors, too.
Lou was in his late twenties and funny and he always told her about his husband, Stanley, who was a first-grade teacher. Lou also talked about his mama, Estelle, who made the best tamales in the world. In between tales, he urged Stella on. He told her that she could do anything she set her mind to.
“Right,” said Stella doubtfully. He showed her how to get up from the toilet by bracing her hands on her knees and leaning forward and then pushing up, how to use a special metal grip to reach for things so she didn’t have to bend over and risk losing her balance. “Use them or lose them,” he told her. “Make them work—that’s all muscles want you to do.”
She felt herself getting stronger. She liked the way that felt. She had never really paid much attention to her body before, but now she was suddenly noticing what it could do, what it wanted.
One day, she overheard Simon talking to her mother, asking her if Stella had ever drawn as a child. “She flunked art, if I remember,” Bette said. “She couldn’t think outside the lines.” She heard Simon talking to Libby, too, asking Libby if this was normal. “She’s not even trying to draw,” he said. “And she gets so frantic. Should we try to stop her?”
“Her brain’s rebooting, that’s all,” Libby said. “Just keep her in paper for now.”
For now, Stella thought, her heart clutching. And then what?
SHE WAS WALKING with Lou, without the IV, all on her own. “I’ve never seen such an amazing recovery,” he told her, and she preened, pleased. It made her want to try harder. Every time she put a hand on the wall to brace herself, he gently took it off. “No training wheels,” he said. “Girl, you got to fly!” Stella almost laughed because she thought of how she had flown, how she had swerved effortlessly between moguls, lifting off a jump into the hard, blue sky. Lou brought her some of his mama’s tamales, heating them up in the nurses’ microwave, and they were so delicious that she almost swooned. “Now you’re fortified, right?” he said. Then he made her try to climb a flight of stairs, up and then down, but her legs were leaden and she panted as she struggled to lift them. “They’re betraying me!” she said.
“When you can do this with ease, then you can go home,” he told her. “But don’t try it on your own.” Fat chance, Stella thought, because all she had to do was try to get out of bed and a nurse would appear, warning her to be careful. “And you still will have to check in with the doctors for therapy every week, and there’ll be checkups.”
Two more weeks passed. She could see her mother clearly now, and it sometimes disturbed her, because now she noticed the way Bette’s hands shook, the wrinkles fanning out under her eyes, the way Bette sometimes fell asleep in the chair. Simon helped Bette up from the chair. He bought her food to eat in the room. The two of them were always exchanging looks and she didn’t know what they meant, and when she asked, Simon said, “We’re just amazed by you.” Why, she thought. Why, why, why?
She was eating anything she wanted, which was mostly Japanese noodle takeout that Simon brought her, or, when she was lucky, she had Lou’s mom’s tamales. She had never liked spicy food before, but now she was asking Lou to please tell his mom to add some heat. She filled four notebooks full of circles, which she refused to throw out because she liked looking at what she had drawn.
I want to go home. I want to see what home is like.
She was restless, more aware of sounds outside her room. She knew what this tense, dreamy feeling was: hospital psychosis, a strange kind of cabin fever that arose because you saw every little thing that was new, you were always held in place, stuck in a routine. There wasn’t a clock in the room, so you couldn’t count the minutes. The air was stale and dry, the windows sealed shut. La la la, Stella thought. I am going insane.
ONE MORNING, a woman with dreadlocks poked her head into Stella’s room. “Hey, I’m Virginia,” she said. She was wearing jeans and a sweater, so Stella didn’t realize she was a patient, not until she told Stella she was waiting for a transplant. She thunked her stomach. “I need a liver giver,” Virginia said.
“Wait, I’m a nurse here. Transplant is ninth floor. What are you doing here?”
Virginia grinned. “They don’t let us out because of infection, but we sneak and walk around the hospital anyway. Sometimes we even go outside.”
“You sneak out?” Stella said. The nurse part of her was horrified, but the patient part wanted to go outside with Virginia, too.
But she didn’t, of course, and a week later the doctors told her she could go home, that her memory might come back entirely, or parts of it might always be shadowed. She’d still have to check back with the doctors every week, but the rest of recovery was up to her.
“What does that mean?” Stella asked.
“It means you’re ready,” Lou told her, but Stella was terrified. What was it going to be like living with Simon again, after all that had happened? And would she be able to live with her mother? With herself?
WHEN SHE LEFT the hospital, it was almost June. Simon and her mom showed up with her favorite black shirt, black jeans and sneakers, and soft bright yellow socks. Simon also brought Godiva chocolates tied in gold ribbons, with fancy cards attached, for all the nurses and doctors. “I can never thank you enough,” he said.
All the nurses brought gifts, too, and there was a small cake for her, which was just a big chocolate cupcake with a waxy yellow candle stuck in the middle. They clapped and toasted her with grape juice. Look at you, you’re amazing, they said, while Libby took photos with her cell phone and Simon leaned against the wall, smiling. “I’ll be back here at work before you know it,” Stella told them. “Just not as a patient again, please.” No one laughed or even cracked a smile. Instead, they grew more silent, and she saw the look Simon flashed Libby.
“I will be back,” Stella insisted. “Don’t you dare give my job to anyone else.”
“Take your time,” Libby said. “What’s the rush?” She looked over at Simon. “She’s going to need you more than ever,” she said carefully. “It’s a long process.”
Stella knew everyone in this room, the other nurses, the doctors, her physical therapist, and they knew her, too. But now they all knew her in a different way. She wasn’t Stella the nurse anymore. She was no longer one of them.