Five days into the vigil, Arianne learned a body could keep breaking in small, private ways even while the crisis everyone else was watching stayed fixed in one hospital room down the hall.
The cramping woke her a little after midnight, low and unfamiliar, in the family suite the hospital had set aside without being asked twice so none of them had to drive home between visits to Franz's bedside. What she found when she checked told her enough to stop breathing for a second before she made herself move, made herself find a nurse instead of standing in the hallway working through every worst possibility on her own.
