“What’s wrong with her?” she replied. I let my fingers hover. Better to tell Leah the truth in person, I decided. I didn’t want her to be alone with the news. “Still waiting on results,” I wrote. As I pressed send, the image of my mother’s body, small and yellow and alone, flashed across my mind. I put my phone on the sink edge, turned the water on, ran it cold over my wrists and imagined bending over the toilet, purging the pills I’d swallowed. I imagined falling to my knees at my mother’s bedside, felled by the sight of her, helpless and far. This is what the movie version of me would do, unable to contain grief and terror of such magnitude. For years my mom had been certain there was something wrong inside her. And it had been up to her alone to save herself, to demand the surgery no one, including me, believed she needed. Bad thoughts manifest bad realities, Jake said. Guilt, my mother always told me, was boring and therefore bad. But I felt it. I couldn’t help it.

I left the tap on for privacy, dried my hands on my sweatshirt then lifted it to check my breasts, zipped into a front-closing sports bra. I hadn’t measured them yet, but they seemed bigger than the C-cups I’d asked for. It didn’t bother me. If Dr. Holle had upped the size while I was unconscious, it was for the best. On TrueYou.com I’d read all about “boob greed,” the phenomenon that sets in post operation, patients wishing they’d opted for bigger implants. I unzipped my bra just enough to see the bruises. They had changed, gone yellow since yesterday. I was healing, stronger than before. On YouTube I’d watched a man drive a pickup truck over a silicone implant to prove its strength. It rolled, tossed by the tires. But it didn’t break.

My phone pinged. “I’ll rideshare,” Leah replied.

“It’s easy to get you,” I wrote, “send ur info when you have it.”

I dropped my phone into my mother’s purse, walked through the hospital with the weight of it on my shoulder, my backpack on my back. Twice I lost my way. Along with the list of names and phone numbers, my mother had given me directions to the location of her car. But I was still turned around, dwarfed by the diagnosis, the building, the heavy bag, and unable to drum up the courage to call my mother’s list. Leaving for Los Angeles had made me a source of pain, and her coworkers, her fellow NA group members, they all knew it. It felt foregone, that I would say the wrong thing and reveal how right she was to wish me better. Double doors parted. I passed into a warm corridor, then through another door, summer air like a wall when I met it.