I had let myself be deceived by Ethan’s so–called tenderness.
For a fleeting moment, I even believed he was different.
The pain in my abdomen had lasted for days. The stitches from surgery stretched across my skin, ugly and raw, even to my own
eyes.
One night, unable to sleep, I became aware of the IV catheter lodged in my vein–a foreign, intrusive thing.
I pressed my fingers against it.
The doctor said that because the tubing was soft, it could stay in my bloodstream for a long time.
But it felt unbearable.
So, on the fourth press, I yanked it out.
A thin line of blood splattered onto the sheets, but it didn’t hurt as much as I expected.
To be honest, I couldn’t feel pain anymore.
I wasn’t sure I could feel anything at all.
I just wanted to be alone.
1/3
Chapter 9
Whether lying here in bed or slipping into death itself didn’t matter.
Nothing did.
I secretly threw away the pills the nurse handed me.
Because no one else had to take them, only me.
They replaced the IV catheter, this time in my other wrist as if sealing my fate–one I had no power to resist.
Over time, I became aware that my mother had come to stay with me.
She cried endlessly, her pain even more obvious than mine.
But I no longer had the energy to respond to her.
I barely understood what she was saying.
She kept pleading and begging me to stop shutting everyone out, to get better, to talk to someone.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to respond.
I just didn’t have the strength to speak anymore.
At some point, I realized that conversations were pointless because no one really cared what I thought.
The slivers of light filtering through the window shifted as the clouds moved, and I used them to track time.
One night, the restlessness in my chest wouldn’t settle.
Sleep remained impossible.
Then, the door to my hospital room creaked open.
How could I describe those footsteps?
They were too familiar–so familiar that I had never dared to forget them, not even for a second.
I knew with certainty that Ethan had come to see me for the first time.
He hadn’t expected me to be awake.
Standing at the foot of my bed, his gaze met mine.
I thought I could look at him with indifference.
But the moment he stepped closer, I couldn’t stop myself.
+15 BONU
2/3
I grabbed the metal lunchbox my mother left by the window and hurled it at him.
He didn’t dodge.
It struck him, making him stumble back slightly.
That was when I noticed–his hair was unkempt, his usually sharp features clouded with exhaustion.
A bandage wrapped around his elbow.
There was dead silence.
The night was always like this.
No matter how the wind stirred the shadows of the trees outside, silence and cruelty gnawed away at the soul.
“I heard from the nurse that you’ve been throwing your pills away.”
His voice was hoarse as he stepped toward me, one slow step at a time.
I grabbed whatever was within reach and threw it at him.
“Alice.”
He called my name the way he always did with that same look in his eyes like he was drowning in love.
