Part 1 — The Recovery Room
The fluorescent lights above my hospital bed hummed with that cold, mechanical whine that makes you feel more alone than you already are. I blinked slowly, my throat dry as sandpaper, trying to focus on the clock mounted on the sterile white wall.
3:27 p.m.
The anesthesia still made the edges of the world blur and swim, but one thing was sharp as a knife: the silence.
My name is Adrienne Davis. I’m sixty-four years old, and three hours ago I underwent what my cardiologist called a “routine procedure” to clear a blocked artery. “Nothing too serious,” he’d assured me.
At my age, anything involving the heart carries teeth.
I had asked my three children to be here when I woke up.
David, my oldest, thirty-eight, promised he’d take the day off from his accounting firm. Sarah, thirty-five and between jobs again, said she’d bring flowers. Michael—my baby at thirty-two—rolled his eyes but agreed to swing by after his sales calls.
The room smelled like industrial disinfectant and something else I couldn’t name. Fear, maybe. Or disappointment.
The machines beside my bed beeped steadily—heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen—everything the doctors needed to know about how my body was behaving.
No machine could measure the hollow ache spreading through my chest that had nothing to do with the surgery.
I turned my head toward the window, wincing at the sharp tug in my neck from the IV line. Outside, the Seattle sky was its usual gray, threatening rain it might or might not deliver. Cars slid through the hospital parking lot below—people coming and going, visiting their loved ones.
Where were mine?
“Mrs. Davis?”
A voice cut through my fog of confusion and rising panic. I turned to see a young nurse with kind eyes and strawberry-blond hair pulled into a ponytail. Her scrubs were covered in cheerful cartoon cats, absurdly optimistic in this antiseptic place.
“Yes,” I managed. My voice came out a rasp, raw from the breathing tube.
She approached my bed with a gentle smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “How are you feeling? Any pain? Nausea?”
I shook my head as much as I dared. “Where… where are my children? Did they leave a message?”
Her smile faltered. She glanced at her tablet, then back at me with the careful discomfort of someone stepping around broken glass.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
TAP → NEXT PAGE → 👇
