Me: Can’t talk now. I’ll call you when I can.
I drop the phone on the chair beside me, and suddenly, the hospital feels too bright. Too cold. Too sterile for a moment like this.
I glance around the waiting room—soulless chairs, white lights, quiet whispers of other lives in limbo. I blink fast, trying to hold it together. But the pressure inside me is a dam cracking open. I can’t breathe.
The fluorescent lights above me hum like a warning, steady and sterile. Everything in this hospital feels wrong.
Too clean.
Too bright.
Too silent.
It smells like bleach and grief.
I’ve been sitting in the same stiff chair for hours, watching doctors walk past like they’re moving in slow motion, none of them stopping to say he’s okay.
None of them look at me like they know he’s going to wake up.
My hands are shaking. My stomach is a pit of acid.
I can’t breathe. I can’t sit still.
I can’t cry.
If I cry, I’ll come undone. If I fall apart, he might too.
A tear slips down my cheek. I swipe at it viciously. I’m not losing him. Not like this.
Not when I found someone that means the world to me.
I pull out my phone with numb fingers, my contacts blurring through tears I refuse to blink away.
There’s only one name I can tap.
Sebastian.
His name pulses on the screen as it rings, and rings—until finally:
“Hello?” His voice is raspy. Groggy. Barely awake.
“Sebastian.” Just saying it cracks something wide open in me.
“Isabel?” A beat. He hears it. Hears the storm behind my voice. “What’s going on?”
“It’s Nathan.” My breath shakes. “He—he’s been flown to a hospital in Germany. There’s… there’s a fragment lodged near his spine.”
I press my hand over my mouth to hold the sob in.
“He was stable. But now he’s not. He went into surgery again now and I just—” My voice shatters. “I can’t do this alone, Sebastian. I…I...”
Silence on the other end.
“Jesus,” Sebastian mutters under his breath. Sheets rustle, drawers open. He’s already moving.
“I didn’t know who else to call,” I admit, voice cracking. “They’re telling me nothing, and I—” I choke. “I’m so scared, Sebastian. What if I don’t get to tell him again? What if he doesn’t wake up?”
“Hey,” he says in a firm and deep voice. “You will tell him again. Because he’s waking up. You hear me?”
