The door was white.
Yuna had been staring at it for seven minutes. She knew because she'd counted every second. Seven minutes of small eternities. Seven minutes of failures stacking like stones on her chest.
Behind that door, her mother was dying.
And Yuna couldn't move.
Her fingers had gone numb where they gripped the hallway railing. The fluorescent lights above buzzed with the particular frequency of hospitals at 2 a.m., a sound she would remember for the rest of her life. The linoleum beneath her feet was the color of old teeth. Someone had taped a paper sign to the wall: Please keep voices low. Patients resting.
Patients resting. The words made it sound like her mother was taking a nap, like any of this was temporary.
A nurse passed behind her, rubber soles squeaking. Yuna pressed herself against the wall to let the woman through. The nurse glanced at her with the practiced non-expression of someone who saw grief every day, who had learned to look through it rather than at it.
"Visiting hours ended at nine," the nurse said. Not unkind. Just factual.
"I know. They said—" Yuna's voice cracked. She tried again. "They said I could stay. Because."
The nurse's expression softened a fraction. "Room 412?"
Yuna nodded.
"Take your time, honey." The nurse continued down the hall, and Yuna was alone again.
Take your time. As if time was something she had. As if her mother wasn't running out of it behind that white door while her daughter stood frozen in the hallway like a broken machine.
Move, she told herself. Walk forward. Open the door. Say goodbye. Simple instructions. Impossible to follow.
Her body refused.
It had been three weeks since the diagnosis. Three weeks of watching her mother shrink. First her energy, then her mass, then something deeper that Yuna couldn't name.
The woman who had raised her alone. Who had worked double shifts as a hospital administrator while writing papers on consciousness and connection in her spare hours. Who had somehow made their cramped apartment feel like the center of the world. That woman was disappearing.
"The scans aren't good," the oncologist had said, and Yuna had watched her mother nod with terrible calm. As if she'd already known. As if she'd been preparing for this longer than anyone realized.
The hospice transfer happened yesterday. Her mother hadn't complained, hadn't cried, had simply asked if she could bring her research notebooks. The nurses had exchanged looks, but they'd allowed it. Now those notebooks sat on the table beside her bed, full of theories about the fundamental connectedness of all consciousness, theories that no serious academic had ever taken seriously.
Yuna had read those notebooks as a child, back when they seemed like fairy tales. Her mother's spidery handwriting describing a vast web that linked every mind to every other mind. The idea that separation was illusion. That we were all, in some fundamental way, one thing pretending to be many.
It had seemed beautiful then. Now it seemed like the particular cruelty of a universe that would let this woman die believing in connection while her only daughter couldn't connect enough to walk through a door.
Eight minutes. Nine.
A doctor emerged from a room down the hall, and for a terrible moment Yuna thought it was 412, thought she'd missed it, thought her mother had died while she stood paralyzed ten feet away. But the number was 408, and the doctor walked past without looking at her, and Yuna's heart stuttered against her ribs like it had forgotten how to keep time.
She knew what was happening. She'd read about it in college, back when psychology had seemed like an interesting elective rather than a mirror she couldn't stop looking into. Acute stress response. Freeze response. Tonic immobility.
Animals did it when they were caught. When the threat was too large, when fight and flight were both impossible, the body simply stopped. Played dead. Surrendered.
Her mother was dying and Yuna's body had decided to play dead.
She wanted to scream. She wanted to tear her own frozen muscles into motion. She wanted to be the kind of daughter who burst through hospital doors and held her mother's hand and said all the things that needed saying.
Instead, she stood in a hallway and counted to ten minutes.
The phone call had come at midnight.
Yuna had been asleep in her apartment, dreaming about something she couldn't remember, when the buzzing dragged her awake. The nurse's voice had been calm and professional: Your mother is asking for you. We think it might be time.
She'd driven across the city in a haze. Parked in the wrong lot. Had to walk through the freezing February air in a coat she'd grabbed without checking whether it was hers or her mother's. It wasn't until she'd pushed through the hospital's front doors that the reality had hit her, the weight of it pressing down on her chest like something physical.
It might be time.
Time for what? Time for her mother to stop existing? Time for the woman who had taught her to read, who had held her through nightmares, who had somehow believed that the universe was fundamentally kind despite all evidence to the contrary, time for that woman to become past tense?
Yuna had made it to the fourth floor. Had walked the length of the corridor. Had stopped in front of the door marked 412.
And then she had stopped being able to move.
Eleven minutes. Twelve.
The door opened.
Yuna's breath caught. A nurse stepped out, not the same one from before, this one older, with grey streaking through dark hair and deep lines around her eyes.
"Are you Elisa's daughter?"
Yuna tried to speak. Nothing came out. She nodded.
The nurse's face did something complicated. "She's asking for you. She's been asking for a while now."
I know. I know. I know. The words screamed in Yuna's skull. I've been standing here listening to her ask and I can't make myself go in.
"She's very tired," the nurse continued. "Her vitals are..." She paused, choosing words. "You should come in now, if you can."
If you can.
Yuna opened her mouth to say I'm trying or I want to or I love her and I can't move and I don't know why and I'm so sorry, but what came out was nothing. Just air.
The nurse studied her for a long moment. Something in her expression shifted from professional concern to something more personal. More knowing.
"It's hard," she said. "Some people can't. It's not a moral failing. It's just what happens sometimes, when the pain is too big."
Yuna felt tears running down her face. When had that started?
"Can I... can you tell her..." She couldn't finish. What message could possibly matter? What words could substitute for presence?
The nurse waited.
"Tell her I love her. Tell her I'm sorry. Tell her " Yuna's voice broke into something that wasn't quite a sob. "Tell her I tried. Tell her I tried to come in."
The nurse nodded slowly. "I'll tell her."
She went back through the door. It swung shut behind her with a soft click, and Yuna was alone in the hallway again.
Thirteen minutes. Fourteen. The numbers kept counting even when she stopped.
She slid down the wall until she was sitting on the floor. The linoleum was cold through her jeans. Somewhere on this floor, someone was crying, low, rhythmic sounds that could have been grief or pain or both. The fluorescent lights continued their insect hum.
Yuna pulled her knees to her chest and made herself as small as she could.
Insufficient. The word circled through her mind like a vulture. She could have called herself scared. Broken. Coward. All of those fit. But insufficient was the one that stayed. Not enough. Not equal to what was required. A daughter who couldn't be present for the single most important moment of her mother's life.
Her mother, who had spent decades arguing that connection was the fundamental truth of the universe. Whose final published paper, rejected by three journals before one agreed to print it, had been titled "The Myth of Separation: Toward a Unified Theory of Consciousness."
And here was her daughter, proving separation was very much real. Proving that some gaps couldn't be closed, some doors couldn't be opened, some loves weren't strong enough to overcome the simple paralysis of fear.
Twenty-three minutes.
The door opened again. The grey-haired nurse emerged, and even before Yuna saw her face, she knew.
The quality of the light changed. The hospital's buzz seemed to drop half an octave. The world became very quiet and very still, and Yuna understood with perfect clarity that she would never forgive herself for this.
"I'm sorry," the nurse said. "She passed about two minutes ago. It was peaceful."
Peaceful. While Yuna sat on the floor in the hallway. While she counted minutes instead of holding her mother's hand. While she let fear win.
"She said something at the end. I don't know if it makes sense, but she wanted you to know." The nurse crouched down to Yuna's level, her knees cracking softly. "She said, 'The door doesn't matter. Tell her the door doesn't matter.'"
Yuna stared at her.
"I don't know what it means," the nurse continued, "but she was very clear. She wanted me to tell you exactly that. 'The door doesn't matter.'"
Then the nurse stood and walked away, and Yuna was alone.
She didn't know how long she sat there afterward.
At some point, the grey light of dawn began to seep through the windows at the end of the corridor. At some point, the day shift arrived, rubber soles and soft voices and the particular bustle of a hospital waking up. At some point, someone touched her shoulder and asked if she was okay, and she said yes even though she wasn't, would never be okay again.
She stood. Her legs ached from sitting on cold floor for hours. Her face was tight with dried tears.
She walked to the door of room 412 and stopped.
Her mother's body was still in there. The nurses had told her she could go in, could say goodbye, could have as much time as she needed.
And Yuna still couldn't make herself open the door.
Three months later, she stood in her apartment at 3 a.m., staring at the wall where something impossible was happening.
A crack had appeared in the plaster. Except it wasn't a crack, it was a seam, a line of light so bright it hurt to look at directly. The air around it tasted like metal and ozone and something else, something that reminded her nonsensically of her mother's handwriting.
Yuna should have been afraid. She should have called someone, run, done any of the sensible things that sensible people did when reality started splitting open in their living room.
Instead, she felt something she hadn't felt since that night in the hospital.
Curiosity.
The seam widened. Through it, she could see something. Not another room. Not outside. Something that didn't have a name, a space between spaces, a color that wasn't quite a color.
And she felt, distinctly and impossibly, a pull. As if something on the other side was calling to her. As if there was a door, finally, that she was meant to walk through.
The door doesn't matter, her mother had said.
Maybe this one did.
Yuna stepped forward.
The light swallowed her.
And when she opened her eyes, she was somewhere else entirely, falling through grey sky toward grey ground, three moons burning overhead in colors she had no names for, her mother's last words echoing in a mind that suddenly understood nothing and everything at once.
She screamed, but the wind tore the sound away.
She fell, and the world that caught her was not kind.