1
5:47 AM
The fluorescent light above me has been flickering for the past forty minutes.
Not in a horror-movie way. More in a this-hospital-needs-a-bigger-maintenance-budget way. It buzzes on a frequency that sits right between my molars, which is a thing I didn't know a light could do until tonight. The tube is a 4100K cool white — close to daylight but not close enough, the kind of color temperature that makes everyone look like they died three hours ago and just haven't been told yet.
I know this because I'm a graphic designer who has spent six hours on a plastic chair in a hospital corridor, and my brain has decided that analyzing overhead lighting is a more productive use of its remaining power than thinking about why I'm here.
Smart brain. Good brain.
My phone is at nine percent. Sophie's name fills the screen in a scroll of messages I stopped reading around 2 AM — forty-something variations ofI'm so sorry,is he okay,please tell me he's okay,I'm the worst person alive,one voice memo I can't bring myself to play, and a photo of something that might be a care package or might be the contents of an airport conveniencestore thrown into a bag during a nervous breakdown. Both, probably.
I close my eyes. The chair digs into my tailbone — designed by someone who has never actually sat in a chair. Somewhere down the hall, a heart monitor is beeping through a half-open door. Steady, mechanical, indifferent — a sound that means someone is alive and doesn't care whether you find that comforting. Two rooms over, or maybe three, someone is crying. Not loud. The kind of crying that's been going on so long it's lost its edges, just a low, wet sound that sinks into the walls and stays there. I don't know who it is. I don't want to know. Everything smells like antiseptic and someone else — Ethan's jacket is over my shoulders, the one he'd left draped on my chair at dinner, the one I grabbed without thinking when everything started happening. His detergent is something cedar-ish and aggressively clean, wrong for a hospital at 5 AM. There's a dark smear on my sleeve that might be road grit from the street or might be the pasta sauce from three hours before everything went wrong. I'm not going to look closely enough to find out.
Three hours ago — no, more than that. Six? Seven? — I was kneeling beside a hospital bed, trying to unlock a phone with hands that wouldn't stop shaking.
"Password," I'd said. Calm voice. Practical voice.I've got thisvoice.
He'd looked up at me through whatever the IV was feeding him — morphine, probably, or something close enough — and his face had done a thing I wasn't prepared for. Not pain. Something softer. More confused.
"Zero... seven... one... four." A pause. Then, half-slurred: "Don't judge the wallpaper."
His phone wallpaper was his cats. Of course it was. Poutine glaring at the camera with the face of a creature who has never found a single thing amusing in its entire life, and Bagel mid-yawn, a blur of orange fur that could have been a throw pillow or a very small sun. I'd stared at it for three seconds too long. Then I'd found his mother's number underMaman— with a red heart emoji — and walked into the hallway to make the worst phone call of my life.
Hi, you don't really know me, your son might have mentioned — he's in the hospital — he's okay, I mean he's alive, he's — no, his — I'm — my name is —
I'd made a woman I'd never met cry at one in the morning.
Now it's 5:47 and I'm still here and nobody has come to tell me anything new in over an hour and my phone is going to die and I look like —
I catch my reflection in the dark window across the hall. Hair collapsed from whatever shape it was in twelve hours ago. No makeup, obviously. His jacket hangs off my shoulders like a verdict.
Tabarnac.
I look exactly like someone whose not-quite-boyfriend just got hit by a car. Which is accurate. But I'd have appreciated the universe leaving me at least one layer of denial.
Footsteps.Soft-soled shoes on linoleum.
The nurse rounds the corner with the kind of practiced calm that means she's either genuinely composed or she's done this four thousand times and the composure is structural. Royal blue scrubs, the shade that every hospital in this city has collectively agreed meanstrust me, I do this for a living.Clipboard tucked against her hip like a shield.
She slows when she sees me. Her eyes do a quick, professional scan — the kind of look that takes inventory without seeming rude, though it's always rude, and both of you know it.
"Mademoiselle?"
I sit up. My spine pops in a way that feels medically concerning but is probably just the chair's revenge.
"You're here for Monsieur Morin?"
I nod. There's a dried coffee ring on the floor next to my foot. Someone sat here before me, waiting for their own version of terrible news, and all that's left of them is a brown circle and the vague impression of despair in the seat cushion. I'm inheriting their misery like a timeshare.
"And you are...?" She pauses. Pen ready. The question hangs between us like a door that only opens one way.
Are you his girlfriend?
She doesn't ask it exactly like that. She asks it how hospital forms ask it — with a checkbox and a blank and the efficient expectation that you'll fill it in and move on. But I hear it the way it actually sounds, which is:what are you to him?
And the answer is: I don't know.
