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30. The consultant’s words landed like shards of glass

The consultant’s words landed like shards of glass on Ted’s already fragile heart. His tone wasn’t cruel, but it was piercing—each word an indictment, each question a silent accusation. “What took you so long?” the consultant began, his voice measured but laced with a sense of urgency. “His breathing is heavier. Why? Simone should have been around. Heart patients like him are... delicate, difficult to handle.”

Ted felt the air grow heavier around him, the clinical hum of machines suddenly deafening. The consultant’s words dug deeper, unearthing feelings Ted had tried to bury. “He’s experiencing severe emotional exhaustion. It’s pulling him further down the valley.”

The valley. Ted felt the weight of the metaphor—it wasn’t just a physical decline but a descent into loneliness, into despair. The consultant looked at Ted with sharp eyes. “Where is Jill? Your grandmother? He’s been murmuring something—‘Jack and Jill went down the hill to fetch a pail of water.’ Over and over again.”

Ted’s throat tightened. The nursery rhyme, so innocent and playful in its origin, now sounded hauntingly sorrowful. The name “Jack” wasn’t just a character in a rhyme—it was his grandfather’s life, a cry for connection in the fading echoes of his mind.

“You can talk to him,” the consultant continued, his voice softening slightly. “He might hear you. Whether he can process what you say... well, that depends. As much as I can tell, this poor man has been starved of family care, of love.”

The words hit like a tidal wave. Starved of family care. Ted’s chest ached as the consultant delivered the final blow. “You’ve been unkind, unfair, and unjust to this frail, departing soul. How can you forgive yourselves?”

Ted swallowed hard, his face burning with a mixture of shame and sorrow. He wanted to protest, to explain, but the words wouldn’t come. Instead, he nodded numbly, stepping toward the door to his grandfather’s room. The consultant’s words echoed in his mind, not as accusations anymore but as truths too painful to ignore.

The thought of his grandfather—once strong, commanding, unyielding—now reduced to murmuring nursery rhymes in the twilight of his life, was unbearable. Ted braced himself, his hand trembling as he reached for the door handle, determined to face whatever awaited him inside.


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