Somewhere in the hospital, my mother was cleaved open, a man searching for danger inside her. I couldn’t imagine him finding it. But if he did, I could tell Ella, suggest she elect to be cut open, too.

I went next to Leah’s account. The latest picture was of a marathon finish line. “Came in fourth! ” the caption read. I liked the picture, composed a new DM. “I guess I know why you won’t call me. I guess you think I ghosted you after you moved away or whatever. But this is an emergency. Naurene is in SURGERY and it might be serious.” I pressed send. It felt strange to use my mother’s name that way. Naurene sounded formal, but also like she could belong to Leah and me both. And I wanted Leah’s attention. I wanted to divest my share of Naurene a little, to spread around the responsibility I felt for her pain, as if I was both the root cause and the cure.

But why was I responsible? Why did my mother see me as someone to confide in, depend on? Why did she talk endlessly of everything that hurt her? Her quest for self-knowledge, self-love, feminism, womanhood, wholeness, was so public and I, of all people, should have understood her exhibitionism. But I wanted a mother out of pain, which took her from me. I wanted a love, Leah, who would stay when pain returned, as it always would. The day we said goodbye, I had cried and Leah had not. Just kissed my cheek and left my body like a bell, struck and ringing. She’d always had trouble with feelings. She’d always used our alter egos to express herself. Even as a girl, she’d rarely cried. So she didn’t intend abandonment, I knew that. But once she was gone, I changed the story anyway, made it familiar: I was needy, wrong, unwanted by her and anytime she texted or called, I didn’t answer; to do so would be to confuse the lesson of my unlovability.

On the TV, Real Housewives bobbed across a phosphorescent lawn at someone’s baby shower, or bridal shower, or divorce party. I watched them apologize, then fight, and imagined my mom, waving her wine glass and weighing in, always wanting the women to connect. I waited for the beige phone to ring, the device in my lap to pulse. The pills inside me turned the implants inside me into flesh and blood. The pills turned time invisible. Eventually, I slept.

IN DREAMS I was with Leah again, the last summer of our little girlhood, the last summer before Instagram, every night spent together. I was with my mother, forty-something and celibate, prone to leaning into the mirror, fingers at her temples, lifting, stretching. “What do you think,” she would say, “just a little tuck?”

“No,” Leah and I yelled. We wanted her as she was, creased and beautiful.