softly. His father’s jaw clenched as he processed what this meant for his son’s future.
I was still trying to process that sentence, still trying to make it make sense in my seventeen-year-old brain, when my own parents arrived at the hospital about an hour later.
They stood stiffly, awkwardly at the foot of Michael’s hospital bed, offering perfunctory sympathy that already seemed to be fading into cold calculation. I could see it in their faces—the wheels turning, the assessments being made, the future being recalculated without him in it.
On the drive home that night in their expensive sedan, they didn’t ask how Michael was doing emotionally. They didn’t ask about his prognosis or his pain levels or what his recovery would look like. They asked how I was feeling—but not in the way that caring parents ask. In the way that people ask when they’re about to tell
