Morning arrived like it was afraid of making noise.
Not because the sun hadn't risen—Milan never forgot how to do that—but because the room itself seemed to hold its breath, as if even light needed permission to touch what had happened here.
Ashley woke in fragments.
First, sound.
A soft pull of oxygen through a mask somewhere down the hall. A distant trolley wheel squeaking. A monitor's steady, stubborn beeping like a metronome for survival.
Then weight.
Her body wasn't sharp with pain the way she'd expected. It was heavier than pain—dull, lived-in, rinsed through with exhaustion of giving up yet coming back.
Like her skin had been stretched and stitched back together by hands that knew how close she'd come to disappearing. Like she'd wrestled the edge of something and didn't quite remember how she'd won.
She blinked once.
Twice.
The ceiling came into focus—white, too clean, too bright, and painfully familiar in the way hospitals always were.
