I nodded, though I didn’t trust my voice enough to agree.Because I knew those hands. I knew their limits. I knew how easily even the best of us could lose.
I stared at the floor until the white tiles blurred again, until my reflection in the sheen of floor wax resembled someone else entirely. Someone small, fragile, waiting for a world that might not come back the same.
And still, she stayed there. No questions. No comfort beyond her quiet presence.
Sometimes that’s all you can do for someone who’s waiting to find out if their heart still exists in the world.
I stared down at the dried blood that caked my fingernails and highlighted every crease in my hands, but I couldn’t wash it off. It was a bad omen, as if washing away Eli’s blood was somehow washing away his life force, his will to live. Erasing the very essence of him. I simply couldn’t do it.
It could’ve been minutes or hours. Time had liquefied, slipping through my fingers without meaning. My scrubs had stiffened with blood, the fabric rough against my skin. The air smelled of antiseptic, copper, and fear.
“Dr. Hawke?”
My head snapped up before I could think. A nurse stood at the end of the hall, still in her surgical gown, mask dangling loosely at her chin. I knew her—Courtney, cardio rotation, calm under pressure. But her voice splintered on my name.
For a moment, I couldn’t move. My knees locked, my body refusing to trust gravity. Then adrenaline did what grief couldn’t—it pushed me upright too fast, the floor tilting under my feet. Mara’s hand shot out, steadying me.
I swallowed hard. “He’s?—?”
Her expression flickered—professional composure trying and failing to hold. “He’s in recovery. Intubated, but… stable.”
Stable.
The word defibrillated my heart, jarring, painful, but alive. It knocked the wind out of me, then forced it back in, sharp and uneven. My legs threatened to give, relief and disbelief leveling me where I stood.
I repeated it, barely a whisper. “Stable.”
She nodded, eyes soft. “They’ll keep him sedated overnight. Dr. Patel said you can sit with him once they finish setting up.”
Mara’s hand was still on my arm, grounding me. “Go,” she said gently.
I nodded again, too many times, as if the act of agreement could hold the world together. My body felt disconnected, moving before my mind could catch up. The hall stretched ahead of me, sterile, endless, and cruelly bright.
Every door I passed, every monitor beep, every nurse at a station, was all part of a rhythm I’d lived a thousand times. But now it was all wrong, unfamiliar, because nowthe man I lovedwas the patient. The man who spilled coffee on me in a campus café and then smiled at me as if he was already half in love.
I pressed a shaky hand to the wall to steady myself. My heart slammed against my ribs, loud enough to fill the quiet between steps.
Stable,I kept repeating, hoping that if I said it enough, it would stay true.
Chapter 11
Holding Vigil
ADRIAN
They’d cleaned him up by the time I got there.
That was somehow worse.
The monitors blinked a steady green beat, the ventilator hissed rhythmically, and Eli lay there—still, pale, almost peaceful. Tubes threaded from his mouth and hands, disappearing into machines that hummed and clicked. The beeping should’ve been comforting. It wasn’t. It sounded like mockery.
I sank into the chair beside his bed, elbows braced, fingers laced so tight the joints ached. I stared at the rise and fall of his chest—the forced kind, the one that only ventilators can manage—and tried to remember the feel of his breath against my neck.
The clock on the wall ticked with surgical precision. Every second marked another moment he wasn’t awake. Another moment I couldn’tfix.
“Hey,” I said softly. My voice wobbled. “You’re late for dinner.”
Nothing. Just the sigh of oxygen through plastic tubing.
