You are anxious about your daughter behind those doors, and I understand, but consider the chair you are sitting in. You are not, strictly speaking, touching it. The electrons in your skin and the electrons in the vinyl seat repel each other across a gap they will never close, so what you feel as solid pressure is a force field, an electromagnetic standoff, holding you a fraction of a nanometer above a surface you will never actually reach.
You have never touched anything in your life. Not the chair, not her hand.
Look up at the clock, the one you keep checking. Its second hand ticks because a quartz crystal inside is being squeezed by electricity 32,768 times every second, vibrating with such fanatical regularity that we trust it to slice time into even pieces. The clock is not slow. The clock is the most honest object in this room. It is your perception, flooded with adrenaline, that has stretched.
The fluorescent light overhead is buzzing because inside those tubes, electrons are slamming into mercury vapor, knocking mercury's own electrons briefly into a higher orbit, from which they fall back and spit out ultraviolet light, which strikes the white coating and softens into the glow you find so oppressive. Every photon reaching your eye began as an atomic accident, an electron falling home.
And the coffee cooling in your paper cup: its heat is not vanishing. It is spreading, dispersing into the air, the chair, the tile, sharing itself with the whole room until everything is the same lukewarm nothing. That is the one law nothing escapes. Heat always spreads out, never gathers back.
The same law runs the clock, and the light, and the warmth of the hand you are waiting to hold. You are not waiting in a broken universe.
You are waiting inside the only direction time has.