She called him on a Wednesday.
Not the hospital. Her.
Her voice was clearer than it had been in two weeks, the specific quality that arrived on good days when the medication was working and the body was cooperating and she sounded, briefly, like herself.
"Come Saturday," she said. "Bring Helena."
Seren held his phone.
"You want to meet Helena," he said.
"I've been thinking about it." A pause. "I'm not going to have many more good days, Seren. I want to use them for things that matter."
He looked at the window.
At the forty-two floors of city below.
"I'll ask her," he said.
"She'll say yes," his mother said. "She's been waiting to be asked."
He had no idea how she knew that.
He asked anyway.
Helena said yes in under thirty seconds.
Saturday was grey and cold and the hospital room had its usual quality of suspended time, the world outside continuing while the world inside existed at a different register.
His mother was sitting up.
