You do not realize you are shouting until the room falls silent around your own voice.
The golden plastic bottle is still in your hand, light and ridiculous, the kind of cheap container sold outside churches and roadside shrines. Water beads on your son’s pillow, his hospital gown, the soft skin of his forehead. The little girl stands beside the bed without flinching, her thin wrist still caught halfway in the air where you yanked it, and for one strange second she looks less like an intruder and more like someone who has walked into the wrong scene of a story and refuses to apologize for it.
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