Where the meerkat stopped, there was a small room. The door was closed, and a very faint light leaked through the gap.
I knew what was in that room. Four possible names. One smiling emoji. The name I never got to give.
I didn’t open the door. I sat in front of it, for a long time. The 90 seconds were long gone. Some guests stay longer than 90 seconds. This one would probably stay for life. That’s all right. I decided not to drive it out.
Before that door, two columns weren’t enough. The test in the photo clearly had two lines. The envelope of pills she showed me once in a car wasn’t from a gynecologist. Someone might have pushed her onto the operating table. She might have decided for herself, sick in body and mind. That column is hers too. And from pregnancy to surgery, it might all have been a story made up by the people who held her. She is a very clever person. She might have shown me that envelope on purpose. A signal let slip at the risk of her life. That was how I read it. And I chose to believe what I saw. Because it might be the truth. If it was, I had to save her, whatever it cost. Everything I did after that, 112, the logs, the stories in the group chat, came from that belief. I provoked them, and chased them with the anger that came back as my fuel. That was how the jackal became my engine. What she knew and what she endured inside that story, I still don’t know. Whichever column I chose, the name in this room was not erased. Grief doesn’t choose a column.
Before that room, I sat in the giraffe’s chair. And for the first time, I sat in her place. Whatever it was, she went through it alone. In it, I believe, her voice was taken from her. But only she knows that. A room far deeper than mine, she is probably still guarding alone.