Angels Watching Over You
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 15: Go to Sleep
The Decision
The relapse did not answer the way the first illness had. Two rounds of salvage chemotherapy bought a handful of quiet weeks apiece and cost Cissy more each time than the last, and by spring the scans showed disease in places no further treatment could reasonably reach. Dr. Li delivered that news the same way she had delivered every hard thing before it — plainly, without dressing it in anything softer than it was, sitting close enough that there was no table between them.
“We’ve run out of treatments that would help her more than they’d hurt her,” she said. “I want to be honest with you, because you’ve earned honesty from me every step of this. What I’d recommend now is comfort care. Keeping her free of pain, keeping her home, keeping the time she has left about living rather than about fighting something we can no longer win.”
Bea had known it was coming for weeks, in the way a body knows weather before a forecaster says so, and still the words landed like something physical. “How long,” she asked, because she had learned, the first time around, that not asking never actually made anything easier.
“Weeks, most likely. I wish I could give you a firmer number. I never can, at this part.”
They brought her home the following day, into a bedroom Bea had spent the week before quietly turning into somewhere soft to be — string lights, her favorite blanket, the shoebox of paper cranes moved from under the bed to a shelf where she could see them without having to ask. Hospice nurses came and went with a gentleness that never once felt clinical. Liam did not leave.
“You understand you can go home and sleep in your own bed some nights,” Étaín told him, gently, the first week. “Nobody’s asking you to hold this whole thing on your own shoulders every hour of every day.”
“I know,” Liam said. “I don’t want to, though. Not one single night. However many are left, I want all of them.”
She didn’t argue it further. She only made up the cot in Cissy’s room properly, with real sheets instead of a spare blanket, and let her son do the only thing he had ever really known how to do for the girl next door — stay.
The Last Good Days
There were, in the weeks that followed, more good hours than anyone had dared expect — mornings when Cissy felt well enough to sit up and want a story read to her, afternoons in the backyard in a wheelchair Liam pushed himself, insisting on the job the way he’d insisted on every job that let him stay close to her since the day they’d met.
“Tell me about Grandpa Shamus again,” she asked him once, propped against a mountain of pillows, her voice thinner than it used to be but her curiosity entirely undimmed. “The angel one.”
“He flirted with every lady in the whole village,” Liam said, settling in beside her the way he’d told this story a dozen times before and never once tired of it. “But he only ever really loved my great-grandmother. And when he died, my mam told me he became an angel who watches over the people he loves. That’s why I’m not scared of it. Not for you, and not for anybody.”
“Do you think I’ll get to pick who I watch over?”
“I think you already know who,” Liam said, and she smiled, and let it be the end of that conversation, the way she let a great many hard conversations end lately, satisfied with having asked the question at all.
Corey Odom came by more than once that spring, too big now for the tiny kitchen chairs but folding himself into one anyway, telling Cissy about middle school with the same easy, undemanding noise he’d filled her hallway walks with years before. Priyanka left a fresh crane on the porch railing every single week without fail, never once needing to be asked. Dr. Li visited on her own time, off the clock, sitting with Cissy for an hour some Sundays doing nothing more medical than losing, cheerfully, at a card game Liam had taught them both.
Going to Sleep
It was a Thursday night in early June, warm enough that Bea had left the window cracked for the breeze, when Cissy’s breathing changed in the way the hospice nurse had gently prepared them for weeks before — slower, and further apart, and unmistakably closer to something none of them were ready for no matter how long they’d had to get ready.
Bea and Étaín came at once, and there was no need to call Liam, because he was already there, the way he had been every night for weeks, curled in the chair beside her bed that had become, in every way that mattered, his post.
He was on his feet before either mother had crossed the threshold, moving to the small dresser without a word, and drew out the yellow dress Cissy had worn the very first day they’d met at the swing set — kept clean and pressed in the back of the drawer for years now, the way some people keep a single letter they never quite let themselves throw away. He asked no one’s permission for this either. He simply, gently, with a tenderness neither mother trusted herself to interrupt, helped her into it, easing her thin arms through the sleeves the way he’d once helped her out of wet clothes in a school bathroom a lifetime ago, and smoothed the collar flat against her collarbone when he was done.
Then he climbed up onto the bed without asking anyone’s permission, the way he never had needed to ask, and wrapped both arms around her carefully, mindful of the tubing and the softness that pain medication had left in her, and held her the way he’d held her through fevers and biopsies and every hard night in between, except that this time there was nothing left to fix, and some part of him had clearly made his peace with that already.