I stayed in my room for most of the evening.
Not because I was tired.
Not because I needed rest.
Because I didn’t trust myself to go back downstairs and act like everything was fine when it clearly wasn’t.
The argument with Max kept replaying in my head in frustrating, uneven pieces. His face when I said he’d failed. The silence after I asked what I was to him. The way he’d looked at me when I said I didn’t know if trust was enough anymore.
None of it felt finished.
None of it felt settled.
And underneath all of it was the one thing that mattered more than anything else—my mum was still in that hospital bed waiting on treatment that had been promised, and every hour that passed made me feel more and more helpless.
I sat on the edge of the bed with my phone in my hands, staring at t
