Elise had met women who wanted silence—out of pride, grief, or fear, but she wasn’t sure which was the case here. It wasn’t emptiness; it seemed to be a defense. Every word she didn’t say felt like a wall she was desperate to keep standing.
The nurse wrote “patient stable” on her chart, but that wasn’t true. There was nothing stable about a girl who couldn’t look at her own child or say the father’s name aloud. Elise should’ve walked away, but something about Olivia’s fragility anchored her to the young mother.