eized by panic, Sam stood in the doorway and watched her mother writhing on the floor in pain, unable to gather herself. She quickly snapped out of her paralysis and got on her knees next to her mother and asked her what was wrong.
"It's my stomach, go and call an ambulance," Evelyn struggled out, each word causing her excruciating pain.
Sam ran to do so. Her nerves were on edge but she was able to maintain her composure and give accurate details to the emergency services operator. She returned to the bathroom and sat on the floor next to her mother while they waited for the ambulance to arrive, feeling helpless and rapidly losing her grip. She looked at her mother lying on the floor in pain and, fearing that she was going to lose her mother like she'd lost her father, was overcome with regret over all of the years of silence between them.
After what seemed like eternity, the ambulance arrived. Sam let them into the house and stood back and watched while they got her mother onto a gurney and wheeled her out of the house to the ambulance. Alone in the house, Sam could no longer hold herself together and felt herself cracking apart. She was nearing the point at which her mental faculties would completely desert her when she remembered Eric telling her that as much as he hated them he had purchased a cell phone so that she could contact him if ever she needed him. Eric was fast asleep but when he heard the phone ringing he knew it was Sam and that it was something serious and he sprang up.
"Sam what is it?" He asked, panic stricken.
"My mom was sick, I had to call an ambulance for her and..."
She broke down crying and couldn't go on talking. She held onto the phone and wailed into the mouthpiece feeling entirely engulfed.
"Sam, don't worry, I'll be right there!"
Eric scrambled out of bed and threw on the jeans and shoes that he'd worn to Sam's house the previous day. He ran out of the house without any concern for his parents wondering where he was going. When he walked to Sam's house it normally took him thirty minutes to get there, running the entire way there at full speed he arrived in just over ten minutes.
"SAM!" He burst into the house and yelled out.
Receiving no answer he set about frantically looking for her and found her in the first room he checked, the kitchen, where she was sitting on the floor against the wall with the phone dangling next to her, tears dripping listlessly down face. Sam was in a state of such deep distress that she didn't hear Eric calling her name. Only when he squatted down to check on her did she became aware of his presence. She threw her arms around him, wrapped them as tightly as she could, buried her head in his shoulder and let everything out. For Eric, Sam's outpouring was heartbreaking. He started shedding tears of his own, unable to reconcile himself to the unfairness of Sam being made to feel so much hurt.
"Why are you crying?" Sam asked him when her crying subsided and she pulled away from him.
"Because it pains me to see you like this."
Moved by his love for her, Sam took his face in her hands and kissed him.
"What happened? Why are you like this?" Eric asked her.
"This morning I heard my mother screaming," she started, still tremulous from her first outpouring of tears, "when I went to check on her I found her lying on the bathroom floor with...with blood coming out of her mouth..."
Recounting the events of the morning, Sam suffered a second breakdown and needed to return to the refuge of Eric's arms. Drained and overwhelmed, Eric searched for the right words to say to her that would calm her but could come up with nothing better than empty reassurances.
