I walked away from the woman I loved... and exactly two months later, I stumbled upon her in a sterile hospital corridor, dressed in a faded clinical gown, fading away like a complete stranger. What she was about to reveal would force me to rethink every decision I’d ever made—and left me terrified that my time had already run out.

The next forty-eight hours were a living hell divided between two different floors of the hospital.

On the 4th floor, Lily lived in a plastic box in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. She was hooked up to a ventilator, a feeding tube, and a dozen monitors. She weighed barely 2 pounds. I would stand next to the incubator for hours, sticking my finger through the porthole, letting her microscopic hand wrap around it. I sang her lullabies. I promised her the world.

On the 7th floor, Elena was in a medically induced coma in the adult ICU. She had survived the hemorrhage, but her body was in critical condition. And despite the coma, Dr. Evans had initiated the aggressive chemotherapy. Poison was being pumped into her veins to kill the cancer while she fought to stay alive.

I stopped sleeping. I stopped eating. I just walked the stairwell between the 4th and 7th floors, a ghost haunting the hospital corridors.

Eleanor moved into my apartment, bringing me changes of clothes and forcing me to eat protein bars.

“You have to rest, Daniel,” Eleanor pleaded one night in the waiting room, looking at my bloodshot eyes and sunken cheeks.

“I can't,” I rasped. “If I sleep, they might slip away. I have to stand watch.”

On the fifth day, I was sitting by Elena’s bed, reading aloud from her favorite novel. The rhythmic hiss-click of the ventilator was the only sound in the room.

I paused, burying my face in her cold hand. “Please come back, El. Lily needs you. I need you. I am so lost without you.”

I felt a faint twitch.

I froze. I looked up.