So. This is how your life ends—at the bottom of the stairs. On your side. Legs curled in. Head bent. Like an unhatched chick, blood pooling rust beneath you.

Your eyes are open, fixed toward the balcony, as if someone still stands there. On clear days, you used to sit outside—with coffee, with wine, with nothing at all, hands resting in your lap, thumbs grazing your stomach the way you did when you were pregnant. Smitten. Aching to hold your baby already. Back then, you’d sneak away from him, finding refuge in the library.

Deep in the stacks, you’d run your fingers down the spines of books about babies, thinking: my girl, my girl, my girl. Like an incantation, a spell to keep you alive. She was why you hung on.

There, between those pages, you found yourself again. That’s where you learned the first sound a baby hears is their mother’s heartbeat. You shared that with the librarian at the circulation desk. She was your friend. A mother, too.

“Isn’t that fitting?” she said, fingers tracing the counter, silver rings dull in the light. “Hearing is the last sense to go when you die.”

You agreed. Yes. Fitting. Ending where we begin.

Was that what you thought about in those final seconds? Your daughter? Her heartbeat? Your own?

Or was it the persimmon tree that came to you—the farm in Japan, branches bending low with fruit each autumn. The stray cats, the rhythmic flick of their tails. The warmth of their coats beneath your palm. The mice and sparrows they dropped at your doorstep. Small offerings you buried beneath that same tree. Next to the baby skull. That was when you learned. Some things are better left in the ground.