No Longer A Substitute
When she finally turned back to me, her eyes were steady, but I could already sense the weight behind them.
“It was my mother’s dying wish.”
The words didn’t land like a sentence; they landed like something final, something irreversible, something that couldn’t be argued with no matter how much I might want to.
A dying wish.
Even as I repeated it silently in my mind, I felt an uncomfortable tightening in my chest, because wishes tied to death always carried a kind of authority that living people could rarely challenge without sounding cruel.
She looked down at her hands, as if the memory itself was too heavy to carry while looking at me directly, and when she spoke again, her voice softened