Ravi returned to the hospital to find Tesni in the lobby, still in her hospital gown, her drip stand beside her, upright through sheer determination alone.
"Oh, hi Ravi," she said, as though she had simply run into him on a street corner.
"You should be resting," he said. "What are you doing out here?"
"The doctors finished the surgery. They escorted me to see her." Something quieter moved across her face. "She looked at me. Just looked at my face without saying anything. The doctors said she needs rest and that we can see her properly later in the evening."
Ravi looked at her for a moment. "I brought you breakfast. Let us go back to your room."
In her room Tesni settled against her pillows and accepted the food without argument, which told him more about how tired she was than anything else could have.
"Thank you for the breakfast," she said.
"It is not a big deal." He pulled the chair beside her bed and sat. "I want to apologise to you, Tesni. The time I have spent with her and the little time I have spent with you has shown me how deeply you love each other. I should have seen it sooner."
Tesni was quiet for a moment, turning a piece of bread over in her hands.
"I was angry at first," she said finally. "Angry for a long time. But when I met her on my birthday, when I saw her face, I realised how happy she was with you. Genuinely happy." She paused. "Aine has been there for me since I was young. Since I became her stepsister. She was not that much older than me but she was mature beyond what she should have been. She laid the path for me in everything. Every single thing."
She set the bread down.
"I love my sister. I have never loved anyone the way I love her. Not like this." Her voice held steady but only just. "That is why I cannot lose her.
Aine lay in the hospital bed with bandages wrapped around her head, her eyes blinking slowly, repeatedly, as though the light itself was something she was still learning to trust.
Tesni stood beside the bed and leaned forward, her voice gentle and careful. "I am Tesni. Do you remember me?"
Aine looked at her. Her brow drew together with the effort of reaching for something that was not there.
"I am so-rry," she stammered, each syllable arriving with visible effort. "I cannot remember anything. I do not know you."
The words landed like something physical.
Tesni stood very still. She felt the tears gather behind her eyes and she held them there through sheer force of will, and what she put on her face instead was a smile. Steady and warm and entirely for Aine's benefit, because Aine was looking at a stranger and the least that stranger could do was smile at her.
The nurse stepped forward softly. "Is there someone you would like to meet? Anyone you can think of?"
Aine looked around the room slowly, taking in the ceiling, the walls, the faces, as though cataloguing a world she was encountering for the first time.
"Who am I?" she asked.
Nobody answered quickly enough.
"Why am I here?" Her eyes moved from face to face. "What happened to me? Who are you?"
Tesni looked at Aine one last time, at her face that held no recognition and no memory, that looked back at her with the polite blankness of a stranger, and she turned and walked out of the room.
Ravi was at the entrance of the corridor, a bouquet of flowers in his hand, his eyes moving immediately to her face the moment she appeared.
Something in her expression stopped him.
"Did something happen?"
He exhaled slowly. "The good news is that she is out of danger. She will live." He paused, giving that a moment before he continued. "The difficult news is that she has lost almost all of her memory. What remains is very little. The trauma to that part of the brain has also affected her balance. She will struggle to maintain it for some time."
Tesni reached for the wall beside her.
"Can anything be done?" Ravi asked.
"Yes. But it will require a great deal of time and patience. Another surgery would present too great a risk in her current condition, so that is not an option we can consider. Therapy is the path forward. Slowly, with consistent work, she may begin to recover. But there is something else." The doctor looked at them carefully. "Her sense of speech has been affected. She does not remember how to speak in the way she once did. Her sentences will come out broken, letter by letter, leading to stammering. That too will need time."
He gave them a moment.
Then he left.
The corridor held the three of them in silence. Tesni stood against the wall, her face pale, her legs barely holding her weight, the news settling into her body the way news of that kind settles, slowly and all at once at the same time.
Ravi turned to Hayland. His voice was quiet and without waver.
"Take Tesni to her room. She needs to rest."
He did not look at anyone else. He turned back toward Aine's door and stood before it alone, and whatever was happening inside him stayed exactly where he kept everything.
He walked directly to the bathroom and closed the door behind him. He stood before the mirror and looked at himself for a long time. Then slowly, almost involuntarily, his eyes filled and the tears came, tracking silently down his face.
He reached up and removed his nose mask.
He rubbed his hand across his face, pressing hard as though trying to rearrange what was underneath it.
"How will I face her," he said to the man in the mirror. "When I am the reason she is like this."
His fist connected with the mirror.
The glass fractured outward from the point of impact, splitting his reflection into pieces, and he stood amid the broken image of himself and said nothing more.