Riley's breath fogged the ceiling. Her eyes opened to a plaster roof. A single bare bulb swung above the bed. The mattress was the one she'd slept on as a child—lumpy, stained, the springs tuned to her weight. Her hands found the thin quilt. Fingers were thin. Scars traced her palms like old maps. She sat up so fast the room tilted. The world reordered: the crooked dresser, the photograph of Grandpa in his garden, the blue calendar nailed above the kitchen door with a red square around a date she knew by memory—the day that had ended her life. Snow, she remembered first. A white hush. The cough that came in waves. A phone that never rang. An envelope returned to her with the words Please deliver to sender written in the margin. Her parents’ silence. The hospital bed. The light that wasn't mercy. This time the light was wrong. It wasn't an operating room. It wasn't cold tile. It was her old bedroom. For a crazy breathless second she thought—no. Then she blinked and counted. She could feel everything the same and different. Her throat tightened. She tried to laugh and heard the brittle sound of someone who had been waiting a long time. Tears came, quick and hot. Not grief. Something else—relief sharpened into an edge. Relief that tasted like panic. Riley shoved her feet into slippers. The floorboards complained like ghosts. The house smelled of boiled cabbage