The Glare

The iPhone screen glared against Maya's ceiling at 3:14 AM, its blue light painting her insomnia in electronic strokes. Sarah hadn't replied in three days. Not unusual—they'd been drifting since Maya moved to Seattle, Sarah stayed in Chicago, their friendship reduced to text messages that felt increasingly like performances. But something about Sarah's last message—'Just taking some time'—had settled in Maya's chest like wet cotton.

Maya rolled over, grabbed the bottle of vitamin D supplements on her nightstand. Her doctor had prescribed them last month, called them 'sunshine in a capsule' for Pacific Northwest winters. She swallowed one dry, thinking how Sarah used to call her a hypochondriac for worrying about everything, back when worry was just another quirk and not a symptom.

The iPhone buzzed. A photo from Sarah: hospital wristband, pale wrist, IV line. No caption. Just the image.

Maya was on a flight before she could talk herself out of it. The Uber from Midway cost more than her monthly rent in Seattle, but she was knocking on Sarah's apartment door by midnight.

Sarah opened it, thinner than Maya had ever seen her, holding herself like something fragile. 'You didn't have to come.'

'Yeah,' Maya said. 'I did.'

They sat on Sarah's couch as the city hummed below, Sarah explaining the leukemia diagnosis like it was someone else's story. The chemotherapy, the vitamins that weren't working, the way everything had become medical and strange.

Maya reached into her purse, pulled out the bottle of vitamin D. 'My doctor said these are supposed to help with everything.' She shook them. 'Probably bullshit, but—'

Sarah laughed, really laughed, for the first time all night. 'Only you would fly across the country to bring me supplements.'

'That's what friends do,' Maya said, and the word felt like something solid, something real, not text on a screen but presence in the room.

Sarah's iPhone buzzed on the coffee table—another notification, another world trying to reach them. They both ignored it.