Within an hour, we were at the hospital.
At first, no one seemed frightened.
Children got fevers. Children became weak. Doctors ordered tests, nurses smiled, and everyone kept using words like precaution and observation.
Then one test became five.
Five became twenty.
Specialists started appearing.
The smiles became tighter.
Nobody wanted to tell us they were worried, but Paul and I could see it in the way doctors gathered outside Maggie’s room.
For twelve days, we waited for an answer.
Every morning, I convinced myself that this would be the day someone walked through the door and said, We figured it out.
Instead, on the twelfth day, our daughter died.
There was no satisfying explanation.
There was no single disease I could learn to hate.
Her death certificate contained medical terminology, but none of those words explained how a laughing eight-year-old could disappear from our lives in less than two weeks.
