The call came just after seven the next evening, while Law and I were sitting down to a dinner neither of us had touched yet.
It was Karen's neighbor — an older woman I'd met maybe twice, who had a spare key for emergencies and a voice on the phone that told me, before she said a single coherent word, that this was exactly that. She'd heard something through the wall, she said. Gone to check. Found Karen and called an ambulance immediately.
I don't remember the drive to the hospital. I remember Law's hand gripping mine the entire way, Markus driving faster than I'd ever seen him drive, and a fear so total it had nowhere left in my body to live except in the shaking that didn't stop until long after we'd reached the emergency room doors.
She was alive. That was the first thing the doctor told us, the only thing that mattered in that moment — alive, stable, in a room down the hall where we weren't allowed to see her yet. The relief of that single word nearly took my legs out from under me.
The hours that followed blurred into a single, gray stretch of waiting room chairs and vending machine coffee neither of us drank. My mother arrived sometime after midnight, having driven straight through from wherever she'd been, and the three of us sat together saying almost nothing, because there was nothing that felt big enough or small enough to say.
"This is my fault," I said, finally, somewhere in the small hours when exhaustion had worn through whatever composure I'd been holding onto. "I pushed her. The confrontation. I told her she needed help and then I left her alone with it."
"You didn't do this," Law said quietly, but I could hear, underneath his certainty, the same guilt eating at him that was eating at me.
"We both said true things," my mother said, her voice rough from hours of crying. "True things can still hurt, especially when they're aimed at someone who's already drowning. None of us made her do this. But all of us are going to have to live with not seeing it coming."
We were finally allowed to see her the next morning. She looked smaller than I'd ever seen her, even smaller than during the worst of the surgery recovery, hooked up to monitors in a room that smelled like antiseptic and quiet grief. She wouldn't look at any of us at first, eyes fixed on a spot on the wall like she could disappear into it if she stared hard enough.
"I'm sorry," she finally said, voice barely above a whisper. "I didn't — I wasn't trying to hurt anyone else. I just couldn't carry it anymore. The wanting. The being alone in it. I didn't know how to stop, and I didn't know how to ask for help without it meaning I'd failed at everything, and it just got so loud I couldn't hear anything else."
I took her hand, the same hand she'd once reached across a table to hold Law's with intentions none of us were proud of, and held it the way I'd held it when we were kids, before any of this had started.
"You're not going to carry it alone anymore," I said. "Whatever happens next, you don't carry this by yourself again. I promise you that."
The doctors recommended inpatient psychiatric care once she was medically stable — a longer stay, real treatment, the kind of help none of us had known how to give her on our own. She didn't fight the recommendation. I think some part of her, exhausted past the point of pretending otherwise, was relieved to finally have someone else carry the weight of figuring out how to fix what had broken.
I sat with her for a long time before they transferred her, neither of us talking much, just present with each other in a way we hadn't managed in months. Whatever came next — for her, for me, for the marriage that had started this entire chain of events — I knew, sitting there, that the easy version of our story had ended the night Karen called Law with a threat in her voice. What came after that would have to be built slower, more honestly, with considerably less room for any of us to keep pretending the people we loved couldn't break under enough weight.
I just hoped, holding my sister's hand in that hospital bed, that we'd caught it in time to actually help her build something better out of the wreckage.