The silence that followed was answer enough.
"Charlotte."
"I had a granola bar."
"When?"
"This morning. Seven-ish." I tried to take the chart back. She held it out of reach, which was annoying because she was two inches shorter than me and shouldn't have been able to manage it. "Sarah, I'm fine."
There was that word again. Fine. My constant companion. My favorite lie.
"You're not fine. You're running on fumes and pretending it's a personality trait." She softened slightly, her voice losing its edge. "Go home, Char. Eat something. Sleep. The ER will survive without you for twelve hours. I promise the building won't collapse."
"But what if it does and I'm not here?"
"Then we'll all die, and it won't be your problem anymore. Very freeing, really."
I laughed despite myself. "That's dark."
"I'm a nurse. Dark humor is a job requirement." She pointed toward the exit with the chart. "Go. That's an order."
"You can't give me orders. We're the same level."
"I'm older."
"By four months."
"Still counts. Go home. Eat food. Act like a person who values her own well-being for once in your life." She paused, then added with her rare calm manner, "You've been pushing hard lately. Harder than usual. I'm not saying anything's wrong with that, but... take a breath, okay? Before you forget how to."
I wanted to argue. I wanted to say that pushing hard was the only thing keeping me upright, that stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant feeling.
But Sarah was looking at me with that expression: concern, and I was too tired to fight it.
"Fine," I said. "I'm going."
"Miracles do happen."
I gathered my things from my locker: jacket, bag, phone with a cracked screen I kept meaning to replace, and headed for the exit. The automatic smile I gave to a passing custodian felt thin and stretched, a gesture that didn't quite reach the cold fatigue behind my eyes.
And then I saw them.
They moved through the corridor like a slow, luminous cloud, parting the clinical bustle around them. A young couple, late twenties maybe. The man was tall, cradling a bundle of white blanket in the crook of his arm with a tenderness that seemed to alter his very posture, making him both larger and more fragile at once.
The woman walked beside him, leaning into his side, one hand resting on his back. Her face was pale with exhaustion, dark smudges like bruises under her eyes, but those eyes... they glowed. They both did. It was a radiant, stunned, exhausted joy that seemed to generate its own gravity.
The father shifted the bundle, and a tiny, perfect hand emerged from the blanket, fingers splaying in a miniature stretch. A newborn. No more than a day or two old, judging by the pink, crumpled sweetness of that impossibly small fist.
The pit in my stomach got deep so fast, so sharp, I actually stopped walking.
It was a swift, violent puncture, a needle of pure, undiluted longing threading towards my heart. I pressed the heel of my hand against my sternum, an instinctive gesture, as if I could push the feeling back down through sheer force of will.
Great, I thought, with the kind of bitter humor that had become my usual reaction.Nothing like a surprise baby ambush to really cap off the day. Ten out of ten, would not recommend.
The sharpness faded, as it always did. But it didn't disappear. It never disappeared. It just transformed, settling into that familiar, dull throb I'd learned to carry. A heartbeat of absence, pulsing quietly within me.
"You okay?"
Sarah's voice. She'd followed me, apparently. Or maybe she'd been heading out too, and I'd been too lost in my own spiral to notice.
