The nausea came back on Friday.
Not the morning kind. The other kind, the deeper one that arrived occasionally without warning and had nothing to do with food or time of day and everything to do with whatever my body decided needed processing at a given moment. I woke at four in the morning with the ceiling tilting slightly and lay still until it passed and then lay still for another hour because moving seemed like a risk I was not ready to take.
I ate the crackers.
I drank water.
By six it had settled into something manageable and I got up and went through the morning routine in the careful way I had learned: slow, deliberate, no sudden movements, the iron supplement with the full glass of water, the ginger tea that Rosie had already set on the counter because she had heard me moving
