I wanted to ask where he had been for three years, why he had walked away, why he had stayed gone, why his name still lived in me like a splinter no surgeon could remove.
Instead, I pressed harder where the blood was coming too fast.
“Stay with me,” I said.
His pulse beat weakly beneath someone else’s fingers.
Weak.
Wrong.
Unacceptable.
“You hear me?” I said, sharper now. “You stay with me.”
His eyes rolled halfway shut.
“Destiny,” he whispered.
My name.
Not Nurse Rourke.
Not some ghost he imagined.
Me.
The trauma surgeon arrived, and the room swallowed him.
After that, there was no room for feeling.
There was only work.
The OR was ready in less than ten minutes.
Ten minutes could be a lifetime in trauma. Ten minutes could be too late. Ten minutes could be the difference between a man waking up angry and a man becoming a phone call no one wanted to make.
Because I was surgical, because I had trained for this, because I knew the team and the procedures and the brutal rhythm of cutting time away from death, I went up with them.
No one asked if I could handle it.
Maybe they should have.
Maybe they saw my face and decided not to.
Maybe Albuquerque General had seen enough staff treat their own that it no longer believed in clean boundaries.
Or maybe fate had a cruel sense of symmetry and wanted me in that room.
Scrub.
Mask.
Gloves.
Gown.
The transformation was ritual.
