Chapter Twenty #2
“Yes,” I reply quickly, gripping the phone tightly. “Her daughter. I can’t find her. What’s going on?”
Dr. Patel clears his throat, and I can practically feel him choosing his words carefully. “I’m glad you’re calling, Miss Katona. We’ve been trying to contact her next of kin, but we couldn’t find an ICE contact in her phone. I’m afraid I have some bad news.”
Bad news.
Please, God, no.
“Your mother felt ill yesterday evening, and her neighbors called an ambulance. She’s currently at St. Paul’s Hospital.”
The world spins so fast that my stomach lurches. My mother is in the hospital. Has been since yesterday. While I was playing house with Osip’s baby, while I was wrestling with my own selfish drama, my mother was in crisis.
I grip the phone tighter, trying to process the information. “What happened?”
“It would be best to discuss this in person,” Dr. Patel says, and his careful professionalism terrifies me more than any dramatic diagnosis could. “How soon can you come in?”
In person.
Which means it’s serious. Which means it’s not the kind of news you deliver over the phone to someone who’s just discovered their mother has been hiding a medical crisis for months.
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” I say, already moving toward the door.
“Miss Katona,” Dr. Patel calls before I can hang up. “Please travel safely. And… it might be good to bring someone with you.”
Bring someone with you.
The euphemism for “you’re going to need support when I tell you what’s really happening” makes my blood freeze in my veins.
I’m out of the flat within seconds, leaving behind the cramped space that now feels like a crime scene.
The hallway stretches endlessly as I run toward the elevator, my footsteps echoing off the walls.
When the elevator takes too long, I bolt to the stairwell, taking the stairs two at a time, my breathing ragged with panic and the physical exertion of fear.
The taxi ride to St. Paul’s Hospital feels endless, every red light an eternity, every slow-moving car adding to my mounting desperation.
I stare out the window at the city passing by— people going about their normal lives, shopping for groceries, walking their dogs, completely unaware that my world is imploding with every passing minute.
The taxi driver, a middle-aged man with kind eyes and calloused hands, keeps glancing at me in the rearview mirror. “You okay, miss? You need me to drive faster?”
“Please,” I whisper, and he nods, pressing harder on the accelerator.
I try calling my mother’s phone again, knowing it’s futile but unable to stop myself.
Straight to voicemail. Again. The cheerful recording of her voice—“ Hi, you’ve reached Judit!
Leave me a message and I’ll call you back!
” — sounds like it’s coming from another lifetime, when she was healthy and hiding her illness was just another small deception rather than evidence of something devastating.
When did I become so selfish?
The thought crashes over me with devastating clarity. While I was consumed with my own problems— my infertility, my father’s death, my surprise pregnancy, my complicated relationship with Osip— my mother was fighting for her life.
Did she drive herself home after receiving test results that changed everything?
And I was too wrapped up in my own drama to notice.
The hospital looms ahead, a tower of glass and steel and institutional efficiency.
I throw money at the taxi driver without counting it and run through the automatic doors into the sterile brightness of the lobby.
The smell hits me immediately— that particular hospital cocktail of industrial cleaning products trying to mask the reality of human suffering.
The lobby is designed to be comforting— soft lighting, generic artwork on the walls, comfortable seating arranged in clusters that suggest hope rather than despair.
But I can see through the facade to the harsh reality underneath: this is where people come when their bodies betray them, where families gather to say goodbye, where normal life stops and medical crisis begins.
“Judit Shiradze,” I tell the nurse at the information desk, my voice hoarse with urgency. “I’m her daughter.”
The nurse— a young woman with tired eyes and the patient demeanor of someone who delivers bad news for a living— types something into her computer and then looks at me with poorly concealed sympathy.
“Room 314,” she says gently, pointing down a corridor that stretches like a tunnel into the unknown. “Third floor, take the elevator to your right.”
The elevator ride feels like ascending into hell rather than just moving between floors.
I smooth my hands over my hair, that’s turned frizzy after being caught in the rain.
It feels like a lifetime ago that I left Osip in that parking lot.
I feel like someone who’s about to receive news that will change everything, and maybe that’s exactly what I am.
Room 314.
The numbers are burned into my brain by the time I reach the third floor.
The hallway stretches ahead of me, lined with identical doors that hide private tragedies and small miracles in equal measure.
Nurses move efficiently between rooms, their soft-soled shoes making no sound on the polished linoleum.
Somewhere, a machine beeps steadily— the sound of life being measured and monitored, reduced to electronic signals and digital readouts.
I hesitate outside room 314, my hand hovering over the handle.
Through the narrow window in the door, I can see movement— a figure in a hospital bed, pale and small against white sheets.
My mother. But not my mother. This person looks fragile in a way that my mother never has, diminished by whatever illness has been eating away at her while I was too self-absorbed to notice.
I don’t know if I’m ready to see what’s waiting for me on the other side.
But ready or not, this is my reality now.
My mother is sick— seriously sick, if the medical files and hospital admission mean anything— and I’m all she has.
Despite my own chaos, despite the mess I’ve made of my life, despite the secret pregnancy and dangerous relationship that have consumed my thoughts for months, she needs me.
I muster up whatever courage I can find and push the door open.
There she is— my mom.
The sight of her hits me even harder than I’d expected.
This isn’t the woman who raised me, who weathered my father’s death, who encouraged me to chase my dreams even when they took me across an ocean.
This is a stranger wearing my mother’s face, pale and drawn and frighteningly thin against the pristine hospital sheets.
Her once-vibrant brown hair, now streaked with silver, is limp against the pillow.
Her skin has a translucent quality that makes the blue veins beneath visible, mapping a geography of illness I never knew existed.
An IV line snakes from her arm to a bag of clear fluid hanging beside the bed, and the steady beep of the heart monitor fills the silence with artificial proof of life.
But it’s her eyes that destroy me. When they flutter open and focus on me, they’re still her eyes— warm and deep and full of love— but there’s something else there now. Knowledge. The terrible wisdom that comes from facing your own mortality and finding yourself wanting more time.
“Ilona,” she whispers, and her voice is paper-thin, almost inaudible above the electronic sounds of medical equipment.
Tears blur my vision as I rush to her side, taking her hand in mine. Her skin feels fragile, like tissue paper that might tear if I grip too tightly, but her fingers curl around mine with surprising strength.
“Mom.” The word comes out broken, everything I should have said over the past months but didn’t compressed into a single syllable. “What’s going on? Are you okay?”
It’s a stupid question— she’s clearly not okay, hasn’t been okay for months while I was playing at being an adult in Budapest. But it’s all I can manage, all my brain can process in the face of this new reality.
She sighs weakly, and the sound is full of regret and love and the particular exhaustion that comes from fighting a battle you’re not sure you can win.
“I’m sorry, darling. I didn’t want to worry you.”
Worry me.
As if her illness, her suffering, her facing this alone is somehow about protecting me from discomfort. As if my worry is more important than her need for support, for someone to hold her hand during the worst moments, for family to share the burden of whatever she’s been carrying.
The guilt crashes over me. While she was sitting in doctors’ offices receiving devastating news, I was falling into bed with a man who murdered my father.
While she was enduring tests and treatments and sleepless nights of terror, I was playing house with his baby and convincing myself I could handle the complexity of my situation.
As if on cue, a doctor enters the room, clipboard in hand and the careful expression of a man who’s about to deliver news that will change everything.
He’s younger than I expected— maybe mid-forties, with the kind of gentle demeanor that probably took years to cultivate.
His presence fills the room with professional authority, but there’s genuine compassion in his eyes.
“Miss Katona,” he says, extending his hand. “I’m Dr. Patel. I’m glad you could come.”
His grip is firm, steady— the handshake of someone who specializes in being a rock when other people’s worlds are falling apart. But there’s something in his expression that makes my stomach clench with dread.
“I’m sorry,” he continues, glancing at my mother and then back at me, “but I need to examine your mother first. Could you wait outside for just a moment? It won’t be more than two minutes.”
Two minutes.