Chapter Twenty-Three
Ryleigh
The hospice room is warm and smells like flowers that are trying too hard. Lilies and something else—carnations, maybe—arranged in vases on every surface like someone decided that enough flowers could make a room like this feel like something other than what it is.
A room where people come to die.
Andi is propped up in the bed by the window, and when we walk in, she smiles. It takes her whole face to do it now—every bit of energy she has goes into that smile. It makes my breath hitch.
“There she is,” Andi says, her voice thin but steady. Her eyes aren’t on me. They’re on Ella, who’s awake in my arms, gnawing on her fist and looking around at the new environment with her usual expression of mild suspicion.
“Someone’s been asking about you,” I say, crossing the room. It’s not true—Ella is three months old and doesn’t ask about anyone—but I say it because it makes Andi’s face light up, and right now that matters more than accuracy.
I lower Ella onto Andi’s chest, careful of the IV line, careful of how fragile she’s become.
Andi’s hands—thinner than the last time, the bones more visible through her skin—come up to cradle her daughter, and the sound she makes is so quiet I almost miss it.
This soft, shattered exhale, like she’s been holding her breath for days and finally let it go.
“Hi, baby,” Andi whispers. “Hi, my sweet girl.”
Ella stares up at her mother’s face and goes still. Completely still—no fist-gnawing, no kicking, no squirming. Just those big blue eyes locked onto Andi like she knows. Like some part of her recognizes the voice that talked to her before she was born, the heartbeat she listened to for nine months.
I step back and sit in the chair by the wall, giving them space. Alexei wanted to come, but I asked him to wait in the car for this one. Some goodbyes aren’t meant for an audience.
Andi traces her finger down Ella’s cheek. Across her eyebrow. Along the curve of her ear. She’s memorizing her. I can see it in the way her eyes move—slow, deliberate, cataloging every detail with the focus of someone who knows she’s running out of time to look.
“You’ve gotten so big,” Andi murmurs. “Look at these cheeks.” She cups one gently, and Ella makes a cooing sound, reaching for Andi’s scarf—pale blue today, silk, covering what’s left. Andi guides Ella’s hand to it and lets her grab on.
“She likes the blue one,” I offer from my chair, my voice coming out rougher than I want.
“She has good taste.” Andi smiles, but her chin is trembling. She presses her lips to Ella’s forehead and holds them there, eyes closed, breathing her in. Her perfect baby scent.
I look at the window. I look at the floor. I look anywhere but directly at them because if I do, I’ll lose it, and today isn’t about me.
“I brought some things,” I say, reaching for the bag at my feet.
I pull out a small album—photos from the past couple of months.
Ella in the bath, covered in bubbles. Ella on the floor with her stuffed pig.
Ella asleep on Alexei’s chest, his hand covering her entire back.
Ella in the Hawks onesie, fists up, ready to fight.
I hand it to Andi, and she opens it one-handed, Ella still tucked against her. She turns the pages slowly.
“Who took this one?” She’s looking at a candid I didn’t know about until I found it on Alexei’s phone—me and Ella on the couch, Ella’s hand wrapped around my finger, both of us asleep. He must have taken it and never mentioned it.
“Alexei.”
She nods. Keeps turning pages. When she gets to the ones from our last visit—the professional photos Alexei arranged, Andi holding Ella, Ella’s tiny fingers wrapped around Andi’s thumb—she stops.
“These are beautiful,” she says, and her voice breaks on the last syllable.
“We’ll give them to her when she’s older. So she knows you.”
Andi closes the album and sets it on the bed. She’s quiet for a minute, just holding Ella, rocking her slightly even though the motion is barely perceptible. The room is so quiet I can hear the drip of the IV and the muffled sound of a TV somewhere down the hall.
“Can I tell you something?” Andi says.
“Of course.”
“When I found out I was sick again—the third time—I was a couple months pregnant. They wanted me to terminate. Said the treatment would be easier, said carrying to term was a risk.” She looks down at Ella. “I told them no. I told them I’d already lost everything else, and I wasn’t losing her too.”
My throat closes.
“She’s the only good thing I ever made, Ryleigh. The only thing in my whole life that I got right.”
I press my hand over my mouth. The tears are coming whether I want them to or not.
“And I know—” Her voice cracks, and she takes a breath.
“I know I did everything wrong. I left her with you without asking. I disappeared. I put you in an impossible situation, and I’m sorry for that.
I am. But I watched you for months when we were roommates.
The way you kept that apartment together, your life together.
The way you went to work every night even when you were exhausted.
You held doors and made small talk with cashiers and were just… kind.”
I didn’t know she noticed any of that. We barely talked.
“I knew you’d take care of her. I knew it in my bones.” She meets my eyes across the room. “And then you went and found someone like him.”
I let out a wet laugh. “I didn’t find him. He found me.”
“Either way. She’s going to have a family. A real one.” Andi’s eyes are bright with tears, but she’s smiling. “That’s all I wanted. That’s the only thing I needed to know before I could . . .”
She doesn’t finish. She doesn’t have to.
I sit on the edge of the bed, careful, and Andi reaches for my hand.
“Thank you,” she says. “For everything. For signing those papers. For the photos. For bringing her to see me even when I know it’s hard.”
“It’s not hard.”
“Liar.” She squeezes my hand, and her grip is weaker than last time. “It’s the hardest thing in the world, and you do it anyway. That’s why I chose you.”
Ella babbles between us, grabbing at Andi’s shirt with determined fingers. Andi laughs—a real laugh, the kind that sounds like who she was before all this—and lifts Ella’s hand to her lips.
“I need to ask you something,” Andi says. “And you can say no.”
“Okay.”
“Will you tell her about me? Not the sick part. Not the part where I left. Just . . . the parts that matter. Tell her I loved music—I played guitar, did I ever tell you that? Badly, but I played. Tell her I loved thunderstorms. Tell her I could never keep a plant alive, but I tried every spring. Tell her I wanted to be a veterinarian when I was little because I thought I could talk to animals.”
I’m crying now. I don’t even try to hide it.
“Tell her I made the best grilled cheese in the world. With three kinds of cheese and tomato. She’ll have to take my word for it.” Andi’s tears are falling too, but she’s still smiling, still holding Ella, still talking like she needs to get it all out before she can’t anymore.
“And tell her I loved her. From the second I knew she existed. Tell her that every decision I made—even the ones that looked wrong—was because I loved her too much to let anything bad happen to her. Even if that meant letting her go.”
“I’ll tell her,” I manage. “Every single thing. I promise.”
Andi nods. She lifts Ella up, both hands, arms shaking with the effort, and presses her face against her daughter’s hair. She breathes in—deep, long, like she’s trying to take the scent with her—and holds it.
“You smell like baby soap and trouble,” she whispers. “Just like your mama.”
I put my arm around Andi’s shoulders, and for a few minutes, the three of us just sit there. Andi holding Ella. Me holding Andi. The flowers trying their best. The afternoon light coming through the window in long, warm stripes across the bed.
Ella reaches up and pats Andi’s face with her palm—clumsy, gentle, the way babies touch things they’re curious about. Andi closes her eyes and leans into it.
“That’s my girl,” she murmurs.
After a while—I don’t know how long, it could be ten minutes or an hour—Andi’s arms start to tremble, and I gently take Ella back.
Andi lets her go, and the release of it—the physical act of her arms opening, her fingers uncurling, her daughter being lifted away from her body—is the bravest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do.
She doesn’t look away. She watches me settle Ella against my chest, watches Ella grab a fistful of my shirt, watches me smooth down her hair. And she smiles.
“She does that thing,” Andi says quietly. “The shirt-grabbing. She does that with me.”
“She does it with Alexei too. She’s a grabber.”
Andi laughs, and it turns into a cough, and I pour her water from the pitcher on the bedside table. She takes a sip and leans back against the pillows.
“I’m tired,” she says. Not an apology. Just a fact.
“We’ll go. Let you rest.”
She nods. Her eyes are already getting heavy, but she’s watching Ella—tracking her across the room as I pack up the diaper bag, slip the photo album onto the bedside table where she can see it, and check that her water is within reach.
“Ryleigh?”
I turn at the door.
Andi’s face is half in shadow, half in the afternoon light, and she looks so young. Twenty-three years old. That’s all she got.
“Be happy,” she says. “Don’t let the hard stuff eat the good stuff. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“And Ryleigh?”
“Yeah?”
“Tell Alexei thanks. For the photos. For all of it.” A pause. “He’s one of the good ones.”
“Yeah,” I say, my voice barely holding. “He really is.”
I close the door behind me quietly and stand in the hallway for a long moment, Ella warm against my chest, her fist gripping my collar. The fluorescent lights hum overhead. A nurse passes with a cart, smiles at Ella, and keeps moving.
I press my lips to the top of Ella’s head.
“Your mom loves you so much, baby girl,” I whisper. “Don’t you ever forget that.”
Ella babbles something that sounds almost like a word, and I hold her tighter and walk down the hallway toward the elevator, toward the parking garage, toward Alexei, who will be waiting in the car, who will take one look at my face and know, who will pull me close and not say anything because sometimes there’s nothing to say.
I don’t look back.
Not because I don’t want to.
Because Andi asked me to be happy, and looking back isn’t how you do that.