“Good. Promise me you won’t hole yourself up in that dark house?”

“I promise.”

She hung up after a few more minutes of small talk and stared at Nell, wondering how her mother always managed to make her feel twelve again. She couldn’t even blame her too much, which just made it worse.

Emilia had always been the most responsible of her siblings, as well as the oldest. Her breakdown had taken everyone by surprise. Now, her mother coped with her fears by babying Emilia, which she supposed was an improvement from sitting outside her door in case she tried to hurt herself, as she had done in the days immediately following her discharge.

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The past year had dealt her one too many blows. Between her father’s sudden death and the crushing reality of shelter medicine, she’d cracked.

Don’t think about it, she told herself, but it was too late.

Multiple professors had warned her about shelter medicine during veterinary school. The psychological toll it took on vets, known as compassion fatigue, was even more profound than in the rest of the field, and a lot of the work involved euthanizing animals deemed unadoptable or whose medical needs exceeded the reach of the shelter’s limited budget. The work mattered. Emilia understood the necessity behind it. Government-funded shelters did their best to help as many animals as they could, and since part of their contract usually meant taking in any animals that came their way, space was an important commodity. So were funds. Shelters served the greater good. So Emilia did what she could and offered a peaceful death to those the shelters couldn’t afford to help. Without more funding and more shelters, there was no other choice.

She’d gone into shelter medicine because she wanted to make a difference. Half of the week she worked at a low-cost spay and neuter clinic, and the rest of the time she traveled from shelter to shelter as needed, examining new arrivals and checking up on the health of the other residents. Perhaps she could have lasted another year or two, but she’d gotten the call about her father right after injecting Euthansol into a one-year-old dog with a bad fracture. Something had snapped.

Hannah had left soon after, unable to handle Emilia’s depression, and it had taken two months of intensive therapy before she felt human again. Not happy, but human. She no longer burst into tears at the grocery store. She remembered to wash her hair and cook herself meals. Most importantly, her brain had stopped suggesting all the ways she could kill herself, pointing out telephone poles while driving or calculating the dosage of the drugs she’d need to administer the same painless death she gave her patients. Thinking about how close she’d come terrified her now. This was a good sign.

“This one.” She chose a paint chip at random: Alabaster Dream, satin latex. Who names this stuff? Holding it up to the dark wall, she pictured the living room in her mind’s eye. White walls, exposed beams, and perhaps a touch of nautical blue somewhere. Rustic cabin meets seaside resort. HGTV always played in patient waiting rooms, and while the budget of the homeowners on the renovation shows made her want to laugh hysterically, she found the demolitions and the subsequent renovations soothing. An obvious metaphor for recovery: tear something down, throw enough money at it, and you’ll create something better. She made a mental note to tell her therapist she was on to her office’s subliminal messaging the next time they spoke.