She holds my gaze for a long, weighted moment.
“I don’t know who’s after you. I don’t know why. But thanks to fate, you avoided death by the tip of a margin that most people don’t get. And this isn’t a gamble anymore, Hazel.”
My first name.
NotChief Martinez. NotOfficer.Hazel. Spoken by a woman who has decided that this moment requires the intimacy of names rather than the distance of titles.
“This is a countdown,” she says. “As to whether you’re happy with this life—this version, this trajectory, this path that was paved by everyone else’s expectations and maintained by your own refusal to stop running—or whether you want to change it. For your benefit. Not the benefit of those sitting in top hats, using you for their own game.”
She lets go.
Steps back.
And smiles.
Not the strategic smile or the clinical smile or the physician’s professional warmth. A real one. The kind that carries sadness and hope in equal measure, the expression of a woman who has delivered the worst news of someone’s life and is now handing them the only thing that makes the news survivable: the agency to respond.
“You can rest as long as you need to,” she says, her tone transitioning back to the competent, practical warmth of a physician who has said what needed saying and is now managing the logistics of keeping her patient alive. “I’ll ensure all the medications you need are available at the pharmacy. The treatment protocol is aggressive but manageable—counter-agents for the suppressant damage, cardiac support, hepatic repair compounds.”
She begins counting on her fingers with the domestic authority of a mother listing chores.
“Increase your daily water intake. Double it from whatever you’re currently not drinking. Protein at every meal. Andeat regularly—these new meds are harsh on the gut, so skipping meals isn’t an option anymore. Three meals minimum. Snacks between. If that cream custard pastry is available, I’d recommend it as a supplemental caloric source.”
She knows about the cream custard.
Small-town gossip is faster than fiber optics.
“We’ll go through your full treatment options at the next appointment. There are pathways, Hazel. Genuine, evidence-supported pathways that can extend the timeline significantly—potentially reverse the damage entirely, depending on how your body responds. But it requires compliance, which I suspect is going to be your least favorite word.”
She moves to the desk and produces a sealed envelope.
“I’ve written a letter ensuring you’re on paid medical leave for the next two weeks. If you need more, don’t hesitate to ask. Your body needs rest the way it needs oxygen right now—not as a luxury but as a survival requirement.”
She sets the envelope on the side table.
Looks at me one more time.
And leaves.
The door closes behind her with a soft click that sounds, in the silence of this room, like the closing of a chapter.
And I sit.
In a sage-green room that smells like lavender, in a bed with an IV in my hand and a monitoring system tracking the cardiac function of a heart that has been chemically compromised for years, in a body that has been telling me it was dying and that I dismissed as “not a big deal” because admitting the deal’s size would have required stopping the work and the work was all I had.
Six months.
What do you do with six months?
What does a woman who has spent her entire adult life running toward justice do when the road she’s been running on has a visible end?
Does she run faster? Does she stop? Does she look around for the first time and notice the scenery she’s been sprinting past—the sunsets she never watched, the meals she never cooked, the kitchen she fantasized about but never built, the connections she severed because connections are vulnerabilities and vulnerabilities are how you get cornered in alleys?
Does she think about the three men who cooked her breakfast and registered as her pack and caught her when she fell and asked permission to kiss her cheek?
Does she think about what it would mean to have six months with people like that?
Or does she guard her heart, the way she’s been guarding it, because the heart is all she has left and six months isn’t enough time to survive another betrayal?
