Evelyn
The curtain might as well have been a wall.
Evelyn stood exactly where she'd been left, hands clenched at her sides, staring at the fabric like if she watched it hard enough, it might move. The sounds from inside bled through anyway, clipped voices, hurried steps, the hiss of oxygen. And the monitor.
Screaming.
The sound had a way of making the world tilt. Like it didn't matter what you believed in or how calm you tried to be, your body heard that rhythm and understood it as danger.
She forced her fingers to uncurl. Forced her shoulders down. Forced her lungs to take air they didn't seem to want.
When the monitor finally stopped screaming, the silence hit harder than the noise. Her chest tightened, a sharp pull under the ribs, and she pressed her palm to the counter beside her to anchor herself.
One.
Two.
Three.
The numbers weren't magic. They didn't fix anything. But they gave her something to do other than spiral.
A nurse brushed past her fast enough that Evelyn caught a faint ghost of antiseptic and sweat. Another voice murmured behind the curtain, too low to fully catch, but she grabbed pieces like they were life rafts. Responding. Breathing. Monitoring.
Her knees threatened to give, and she hated herself for it. Not because weakness was shameful , she knew better, but because it happened every time, and it never got easier. Like her body insisted on reminding her that no matter how capable she was, she was not in control here.
She stayed upright through habit alone.
Somewhere down the hall, someone said quietly, "She's here again."
Not cruel.
Not kind.
Just factual.
Evelyn didn't turn her head. She didn't react. Reacting would mean admitting she'd heard it, and she didn't owe anyone that. Besides... they were right. She was here again.
The call replayed on a loop in her mind. Barely conscious. Unstable. Possible overdose.
Possible.
She hated that word. Hated how doctors used it like a cushion, like it softened the reality. Possible was a polite way of saying: get ready.
Her gaze dropped to her hands.
Clean. No blood. No antiseptic. Nothing to prove she belonged in this hallway except the way she was standing like she'd been summoned.
Useless.
She hated waiting. Hated how it stripped away the one thing she trusted herself with, action. When she was moving, she could keep the fear behind her ribs where it belonged. Standing still gave it space to grow.
The curtain shifted.
Evelyn straightened instantly, heart kicking hard against her sternum.
A man stepped out first, tall, broad-shouldered, moving with the kind of focus she recognized from a hundred hospital shifts. He didn't look at the floor or the ceiling. He looked straight ahead like the world was something he could organize if he tried hard enough.
Rowan.
The name landed in her mind before he said anything else, and the recognition came sharp, almost disorienting. She hadn't expected her past to walk into her present like this. Not here. Not now.
It had been years since she'd last seen him, but her brain filled in the missing space with cruel ease: lecture halls, fluorescent corridors, the end of a month she'd barely survived, and the way she'd noticed him even before she'd known his name.
He looked different up close. Not because he'd changed entirely, but because there was a steadiness to him now that made the air around him feel quieter. Like the hospital noise couldn't touch him the way it touched everyone else.
He spoke, and the words hit her like oxygen. Her shoulders sagged before she could stop them, relief rushing so fast it stung behind her eyes.
She asked to see Noah, because it was always Noah in her mind, even when everyone else turned him into "the patient."
Rowan's answer was gentle but firm.
Not yet.
She hated the word yet almost as much as she hated possible. Yet meant time. Yet meant waiting. Yet meant anything could change before you got what you wanted.
The question she didn't want to ask still rose anyway.
"Is he going to die?"
She watched Rowan's face as she asked it, searching for a crack, anything that would tell her what he wasn't saying. He didn't rush. He didn't soften it. He gave her the only truth that mattered.
"He's alive."
It shouldn't have been enough. It was.
Her throat tightened and she swallowed hard. She nodded once, sharp, like if she nodded correctly she could keep herself together.
"That'll do," she managed, the words quiet but real.
The hallway surged around them. People moving, voices calling, the constant friction of emergency. And still, in the space between them, there was something strangely still, like the air remembered them even if they pretended it didn't.
"You're a doctor" he said.
He glanced at her coat. She saw him register it, not the color, not the fabric, but the absence. No hospital name. No department. No badge swinging from a lanyard.
"Yes, I graduated from a different institution"
Her own voice went cooler when she answered him, the way it always did when she felt seen too closely. She didn't give him much. Names. Work. The narrow version of her life that could fit inside a hallway without spilling.
When she said she graduated , she also meant: don't ask me more.
The nurse arrived and said she could go in, but only for a bit.
Evelyn didn't hesitate. Hesitation was how you broke.
She moved past Rowan and through the curtain, and as the fabric brushed her shoulder, the smell hit her immediately, alcohol swabs, sweat, fear. She had been right. It was always the same.
Inside, Noah lay too still, she had not seen him in a week; his blonde hair seemed dirty but he was as beautiful as ever. She could not stop wondering what was the story here.
She didn't let herself think the rest yet. Thinking could wait. Feeling could wait. She crossed the room with controlled steps, counted her breaths again without meaning to, and reached for his hand as if contact alone could anchor him to the world.
One minute.
She could survive one minute. Always one at a time.
Behind her, the curtain shifted again, and she knew Rowan was still out there, not as comfort, not as salvation, just as a quiet fact in the hallway.
A reminder that her past existed, that for a brief moment in time her life was almost entirely about herself and herself alone.
And though she had no idea what was to come she knew that whatever came next, she would have to face it head on.