The video cut off.
I sat absolutely still for what might have been two minutes or ten. Then I picked up the phone and called the hospital’s nursing line.
“This is Olivia. I’m Andrew’s mother. I found some information that his medical team needs to see immediately. Can you have someone call me back as soon as possible?”
I ended the call. My voice had cracked somewhere in the middle of the message, but I hadn’t stopped talking.
“I’m here now, sweetheart,” I said to the empty room, to my son who was two miles away in a hospital bed. “I’m listening. I promise.”
Then I finally let myself cry — not the controlled, contained kind, but the kind that comes from the deepest part of a person, the part where fear and guilt and love all live in the same compressed space.
He had reached out to me. He had been scared and he had done exactly what I always told him to do — he had told me when something felt wrong. And I had been dealing with something at work, or driving, or distracted in the thousand ordinary ways that single parents are distracted, and I had not seen it in time.
