The silence in the ICU waiting room after Chandni's ghostly vigil was a living entity, thick with shared dread and the unsettling new ingredient of pity. The family, a constellation of grief, was forced to confront not just Aadiv's shattered future, but the bleak arithmetic of their own.

Dr. Evans's prognosis—the low likelihood of walking, the specter of cognitive change, the sheer, grinding eternity of full-time care—had been the first earthquake. Now came the aftershock: the logistics, the cost, the quiet erosion of their own lives. They gathered in a hushed circle, not as a joyous family, but as a desperate board of directors facing a project with no end and no profit.