The apartment was heavy with silence, the kind that fills a home after a heart stops beating. Anna stood in her mother’s kitchen, sunlight stretching amber shadows across the floor. It had been five days since the funeral, five days since she watched the earth reclaim the woman who had been her entire world. Grief had softened from a sharp stab to a constant ache that made every breath deliberate.
Earlier that afternoon, Anna had forced herself back into the sterile corridors of the city hospital. She had avoided the oncology ward for months, afraid the monitors and nurses would drag her back into the trauma of her mother’s final weeks. But the hospital called: her mother’s belongings needed to be collected, the last tangible pieces of a life extinguished too soon.
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