“Don’t try to talk yet,” she said gently. “You’ve been unconscious for several hours. You had a severe cardiac episode. We nearly lost you twice.”

The words hit me like ice water. Nearly lost me twice.

“We need to contact your emergency contact,” she continued, glancing at her chart. “That would be your son, Michael.”

Michael. My only child. The boy I had raised alone after his father walked out when he was three. The young man I had worked three jobs to put through college. The successful businessman who now lived in a mansion across town with his wife, Victoria.

“Yes,” I whispered. “Please, call him.”

The nurse stepped out, and I lay there in the sterile silence, a lifetime of sacrifice flashing before my eyes. Twenty-eight years of putting his needs before mine. Twenty-eight years of believing that when the time came, he would be there for me the way I had always been there for him. I was naive.