I spent fifteen days lying in a hospital bed after the car accident. The days felt long and all the same, with bright lights and machines beeping nonstop. I was badly hurt in ways I didn’t fully understand, and I couldn’t speak because of the pain and medicine. The doctors said I was lucky to survive, but it didn’t feel that way. It felt like I was stuck in a silent, empty place while time kept moving on.
No one visited me.
My children lived far away and couldn’t come right away because of work and school. My friends cared, but they were busy with their own lives. Every day felt the same—nurses сменялись, doctors checked my charts, and time passed slowly. Nights were the worst. That’s when the loneliness felt heavy and overwhelming.
Almost every night, a girl showed up.
She was quiet, about thirteen or fourteen years old, with dark hair she tucked behind her ears and eyes that looked older than she was. She didn’t talk much. She would pull a chair next to my bed and sit there calmly, like she belonged. I couldn’t speak or ask who she was, but she seemed to understand. She would lean close and whisper softly.
“Be strong,” she said one night. “You’ll smile again.”
I held on to those words. When the pain or fear got worse, I waited for her to come and sit beside me. She never touched the machines or tubes. She just stayed. And when I felt unseen and alone, that meant everything to me.
When I could finally talk, I asked a nurse about her. The nurse kindly but clearly told me there had never been a girl visiting me. No one like that was listed. They said it was probably the medicine or the trauma—hallucinations caused by stress.
I believed them. I had no choice.
Six weeks later, I was released from the hospital and went home, still weak but thankful to be alive. That first afternoon, as I unlocked my front door, I felt the same strange quiet I felt in the hospital at night.
Then I saw her.
She was standing at my door, nervously twisting her fingers. It was the same quiet girl from the hospital.
“My name is Tiffany,” she said.
I felt a chill as she explained who she was. She was the daughter of the woman whose car crossed into my lane and caused the crash. Her mother didn’t survive, even after many surgeries and long days in the ICU. Tiffany spent those nights at the hospital, walking the halls because she couldn’t bring herself to go home alone.
She told me that watching me fight to stay alive gave her hope that her mother might survive too.
Then she reached into her pocket. “I need to give you this.”
She put a necklace into my hand—the one I had been wearing the night of the accident. It was my grandmother’s necklace, and I thought it was lost forever. Tiffany had found it and kept it safe, worried it might disappear.
I cried. I hugged her and thanked her for being kind to me while she was dealing with her own deep pain.
During the hardest time in both our lives, we met. Over the years, I became like a mother to Tiffany. We still stay in touch, and she visits when she’s in town.
And every time I smile, I remember the quiet girl who stayed with me when no one else did—and changed my life through simple, steady kindness.