Those hormones, yeah, they were impossible to ignore.
But then something happened that June.
Something that changed… everything.
The clinic stopped doing dialysis.
The only place in the area that offered the service just… decided they didn’t want to anymore.
And the closest hospitals didn’t offer it as outpatient treatment either.
In fact, the closest place we could find was almost thirty-five minutes away.
Still, there was hope.
Until, of course, my gran dashed it.
“I am not riding a bus for over an hour to go sit somewhere for four hours, three times a week. I’m tired, Amaranta,” she said, and I could see it in her eyes.
She was tired.
Tired of treatments.
Tired of feeling shitty even though she was getting them.
Tired of her entire life revolving around her diseases.
She was just… tired.
“And you’re grown now,” she added, pressing a hand to my cheek.
I’d had my eighteenth birthday just a few weeks before. I was officially an adult. I didn’t need a caretaker anymore in the state’s eyes.
It wasn’t until the week following her decision, as her body backed up with waste without the dialysis to clean it back out, that I realized she’d only been holding on for me. Fighting for me. Because she didn’t want my life upended so close to going away to the college that I’d fought tooth and nail for.
It had been a good death, all in all.
No pain.
Just tiredness.
And she went peacefully in her sleep.
That entire week, Seeley didn’t leave my side. He was there, day and night, only running out for long enough to get us food if we were hungry, which we found we just weren’t, not as we were literally watching a human being we both cared for waste away.
“Shhh,” he’d murmured into my hair as he wrapped me up tight, holding onto me as I shattered apart while the coroner came to take her away. “It’s going to be okay,” he’d assured me.
At that moment, I was sure it couldn’t.
But as the days passed, I felt fueled by a new determination.
I always wanted to take over the clinic.
But after they made the asinine move to remove the dialysis program, and therefore ultimately took my grandmother’s life, yeah, I had a fire lit up under me.
To get my degree.
To come back.