I finished the curve of her jaw, then paused. The light hit the page just right, catching on the grooves. I breathed in sharply, suddenly too aware of how empty the hallway had become.
My heart stuttered. That sixth sense I never liked trusting—too many times it had been right.
I shoved my sketchpad under my arm, stood too quickly, and dropped my charcoal pencil. It bounced, once, twice, before skittering under the bench.
"Shit." I cussed in a low voice; I was practically on edge
I crouched to grab it, but a wave of dizziness hit me. I clutched the bench for balance. Just adrenaline, I told myself. Nothing new. I had learned how to catalog every sensation, every tremble, every racing beat. My body wasn't sick anymore, but it didn't trust that yet.
When I looked up, the hallway was empty again.
I breathed shakily aa I brushed off my leggings and stood up, pressing the sketchpad flat against my chest. I didn't even notice the second drawing had slipped loose, fluttering like a whisper to the floor beneath the window. I quickly took my leave, heading towards my room.
---
Noah
Noah Bennett didn't come to the east wing often.
He didn't like how it echoed.
He'd just finished his shift and taken a wrong turn—or maybe not wrong, just unplanned. He needed a moment away from the controlled chaos of the ER. His mind was racing, full of charts, clipped conversations, and the dull ache in his feet. But something about the silence of this hall drew him in. Something unspoken.
He saw it before he saw her.
A piece of paper, half-curled near the baseboard, barely catching the sunlight.
He bent down, turning it over with a practiced gentleness. Not because it was fragile. Because something told him it wasn't his to touch.
The drawing was haunting.
A girl, captured mid-collapse, her expression so vivid it clenched something deep in his chest. He studied the linework, the heaviness in the strokes. Whoever had drawn this didn't just see pain. They had lived it.
Noah glanced down the corridor, but it was empty.
His eyes flicked back to the page. No name. No signature. But there was something familiar in the art. The emotion, maybe. Or the hands that had drawn it. He had seen them once—gripping a railing, folded over a blanket in a waiting room, tremoring just slightly as they reached for a cup of tea.
He slipped the drawing between the pages of his notebook and tucked it away, a question blooming in his chest like a storm cloud on the horizon.
---
Elena
It wasn't until hours later that I realized the drawing was gone.
The second sketch. The one I'd been working on last night—the one of her.
I searched everywhere. My room. The art bag. The hallway. Under the chair. But it was gone.
I told myself it didn't matter. That it was just paper. That I could redraw it. But something inside me curled into a tight knot, breath sharp in my lungs.
Because it had mattered.
Because it had been me, too.
And now someone else had it.
____
The corridor was never meant to feel like home, but after so many nights of wandering through its sterile quiet, I knew every flicker of the overhead lights, every creak of the floorboards that hospital maintenance never got around to fixing. I'd memorized the way the shadows danced along the walls when the world was asleep and the nurses whispered like ghosts in passing.
It was past midnight. The halls were nearly deserted, save for the occasional soft beep from machines down the cardiac wing and the whisper of air vents humming overhead. I was barefoot, the soles of my feet chilled by the linoleum floor, the hem of my hospital gown brushing against my ankles. I'd told the night nurse I was heading to the common room for tea. She didn't question me—she never did. No one questioned the quiet, forgettable daughter.
Except tonight felt different. As I reached the end of the hallway, something unfamiliar tugged at my senses.
Music.
It was faint, so soft I thought I'd imagined it. But when I stopped, heart thudding, I heard it again—clear, deliberate notes drifting from an open door. A piano, mournful and slow. I couldn't place the song, only that it carried a kind of ache I knew too well.
I followed it like a moth to flame.
The sound led me past the diagnostics wing and toward the back offices where most of the doctors retreated to finish paperwork or hide from reality. That was when I saw the light. Slanting out of a room like a secret—it spilled across the floor, golden and gentle, too warm for a hospital. I edged closer, not breathing.
And there he was.
Dr. Noah Bennett.
Sitting alone in his office, shoulders hunched slightly, hands poised over a small keyboard on his desk. The lights were dim, casting shadows along his jaw, the glow illuminating a softer version of the man I usually saw walking briskly in his white coat, eyes focused on charts and patients and everything that wasn't me.
I don't know what made me stay. Maybe it was the way his fingers moved—not clinical or calculated, but full of soul. As if playing the piano wasn't a hobby for him, but a confession. A language he spoke when words weren't enough.
I lingered in the doorway, not daring to step in, not daring to move.
He didn't see me.
Good.
I didn't want to ruin it.
I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes, letting the music fill the hollow parts of me. For a moment, the hospital didn't feel like a prison. For a moment, I wasn't Elena Moore, the sacrificial lamb, the walking blood bank, the afterthought. I was just a girl listening to something beautiful in the dark.
And God, how I needed that.
I must've stood there for ten minutes, maybe more. Time lost its shape around him. Around the music.