Andre handed her a paper cup of lemonade from a cart and sat close enough that their knees touched, a quiet architecture of marriage after scare.
"You ever think about that night and get stuck?" he asked.
"Yes," she said. "Then I think about Edith standing up. And Rita moving. And Ray clearing a path without making it a scene. And Devin saying he was scared with the mask on. And Nora in the hallway with a cart, not asking for forgiveness like it was a coupon. And I get unstuck enough to cook dinner and check the spacer and sleep a little."
Andre nodded, turning the lemonade cup in his hands. "I still want to write the nurse a letter sometimes. Not hate. Just—remember."
"Don't," Alana said gently. "She has a board letter from a third-grade teacher. That's denser than anything we could mail. And she has the audit numbers. Memory is already working. Our job is Devin, and the next time a colleague at Meridian asks how to teach a family to escalate without apology."
They sat. The park filled with the soft chaos of people who did not know how close another family had come to a different ending in a room of blue chairs. A boy on the monkey bars shouted that he was a helicopter. A dog tugged its leash toward a dropped pretzel. Life, rude and generous, continued without requiring Alana's testimony. She found she could love that fact without mistaking it for justice completed.
Andre bumped her shoulder. "Next year, when soccer starts full, we tell the coach the Harborview plan is laminated and nonnegotiable."
"Already drafted in my head," Alana said. "With peak flow zones and a phone tree. Florence is contact three and will arrive with grapes and opinions."
Florence, from the bench, called without looking up from her pretend novel, "I heard that. Grapes are electrolytes for the soul."