So I nodded.
Professional.
Small.
Polite.
A nurse acknowledging a patient’s family from the hallway.
Then I walked away.
I made it twelve steps before the pain hit.
Not all at once. Not dramatic enough for walls or knees or hands pressed to my mouth. It simply opened in me, clean and deep, like something surgical. Like the wound had been waiting until I was out of sight to start bleeding.
By the nurses’ station, someone asked me a question about a chart.
I answered.
I had no idea what I said.
Apparently, it was correct, because the nurse nodded and moved on.
That was the strangest part of heartbreak as an adult.
The world did not stop for it.
No music swelled. No rain began tapping against windows. No one turned dramatically as you passed, sensing a love story collapsing quietly under fluorescent lights.
A printer jammed.
A patient vomited in Bay Four.
Someone’s grandmother needed help to the bathroom.
An alarm went off because a man with pneumonia forgot he was attached to oxygen and tried to get up.
And I kept moving.
Because that was what I did now.
I was not the girl from the desert.
I was not the girl at the grave.
I was not the girl in Cabo holding a bracelet like it was a promise.
I was Nurse Rourke, and Nurse Rourke had patients who did not care that Dylan Degan had chosen the woman wearing his ring.
So I charted.
I checked vitals.
I helped change a dressing on a diabetic wound that smelled like infection and neglect.
I held a baby while his mother signed discharge papers with shaking hands.
I found warm blankets for an elderly man who called me sweetheart and told me I looked like his first wife before she got mean.
