Thursday mornings meant Histology, twenty-two of us filing into that stuffy room that always smelled like old carpet and chemicals.
We were given one slide each and one hour to figure it all out.
I had not slept again.
Not because of Ethan this time. Just everything. The accumulated weight of the week sitting on my chest at 3am, refusing to move.
I took my seat, set up my microscope, found the slide. Cardiac muscle tissue. Of course it was cardiac muscle tissue.
I looked through the eyepiece and tried to concentrate.
She walked in twelve minutes late. No apology, no explanation.
Dr. Whitney. The name was on the board. I hadn't heard of her before.
She was somewhere in her fifties, small, quiet and hard to ignore. She looked at us once, then started walking between the benches.
She didn't speak for a full minute. Just moved through the room, pausing occasionally, glancing at slides, at notes, at faces.
She stopped at Stephanie first.
"What are you looking at?" she said.
Stephanie answered right away. three sentences, calm and sure.
Miss Whitney moved on without a word.
She stopped at two more students. Same question. Same silence after.
Then she stopped at me.
"You," she said. Not unkindly. Just directly. "What are you looking at?"
I looked through the eyepiece. "Cardiac muscle tissue," I said. "The striations are visible, the branching pattern, the intercalated discs…"
"I didn't ask you what you could identify," she said. "I asked what you were looking at."
I looked up from the microscope.
She was watching me with an expression I couldn't read. Not hostile. Not warm. Just attentive.
"I'm not sure I understand the difference," I said.
"I know," she said.
She moved on.
At the end of the session she addressed the room for the first time.
"Histology is not a memory exercise," she said. "You are not here to retrieve information. You are here to learn how to see. Those are not the same thing." She looked around the room. "Most of you are retrieving. Very few of you are seeing."
She picked up her bag.
"Next week," she said. "Come prepared to actually look."
She left.
The room sat in silence for a moment.
Zara leaned over from the next bench.
"Who was that?" she whispered.
"I have no idea," I said.
We got food after. Burgers and fries from the canteen, we took the window seats
"She scared me," Zara said.
"She didn't scare me," I said.
Zara looked at me.
"She slightly scared me," I said.
Zara laughed so loud the couple at the next table looked over.
"She asked me what I was looking at," I said. "I told her. Apparentlythat was wrong."
"What did she want you to say?" Zara said.
"I don't know." I picked up a fry. "That's what's bothering me."
Zara was quiet for a moment. "Maybe that's the point," she said. "Maybe she wanted you to not know."
I looked at her.
"What?" she said. "I can be deep sometimes."
"Since when?"
"Since always." She stole a fry from my tray. "You're just usually too busy being anxious to notice."
I laughed, a little surprised by what she said.
We sat there longer than we needed to, watching the street, not talking about Ethan or Stephanie or any of it.
It was the most normal I had felt all week.
I got home at six. Showered. Sat at my desk.
I was actually reading my notes, properly reading them, when my phone buzzed.
It was Ethan.
Not an explanation. Not an apology. Just:
"I've been thinking about what you said. Can we start over?
I stared at it."
I read the message again.
Then I put my phone down and looked at my notes and tried to remember what Miss Whitney had said.
The difference between identifying and seeing.
I picked my phone back up.
My finger hovered over the screen for a long moment.
Then I typed: okay.
One word. Three letters. The smallest possible yes.
I put my phone down and looked at my notes and told myself it meant nothing.
It meant everything and I knew it.