I've spent most of my adult life inside hospital walls. SafeSpace hospital is where I learned to read a fading pulse like a sentence, where I stopped asking for permission and started making decisions that mattered, where each second meant saving another life. At twenty-eight, I'm a specialist one of the youngest in the hospital and that's not by accident. It's because I work. Hard. Long. Relentlessly.
Love has always felt like an optional headline in someone else's life. It's not that I don't understand it, I just never had the time to entertain it not that I care for it. There are emergencies that don't wait for butterflies in one's stomach, and patients who need stability far more than poetry. For now, I prefer the certainty of a diagnosis to the ambiguity of a heart.
At 4:00 p.m., Reya, one of the nurses came rushing for me, cheeks flushed from running.
"Dr. Rose!" she gasped. "There's a call for you from the director!"
"Why would he call me? Is it urgent?" I asked, a part of me has already calculated what this could mean. His words has always carried weight in this very hospital. Reya's expression said it was more than just a simple thing.
"He said if you're not in his office in ten minutes, he'll fire me today! So hurry and run!" she squealed, half laughing through panic. I wanted to calm her down, but the look on her face said enough. Without thinking much, I started running.
A few seconds later, I stood at the director's office, breath steadying. "Assalamualaikum, may I come in?" I said, stepping inside.
Anyone else might have been nervous to be summoned like that. Not me, because Dr. Heiri, the director, wasn't just my superior. He was my father.
"Waalaikumussalam. Come in, Erina," he said, motioning me to sit.
"Dr. Heiri, Dad, why did you call for me?" I asked, forcing a light tone upon myself like a little cub meeting it's father.
He removed his glasses and sighed. "I'm sorry to bring this to work, but it's urgent. Your grandmother called. Your grandfather has been in an accident. He's in the hospital now."
My hands went cold. "Why didn't you tell me sooner?"
He rubbed his forehead, eyes distant. "I wanted to bring you with me, but there were complications. I thought it best to tell you now. You should get ready, Erina."
The words hit me more than it should.I was always close to my grandfateger. Before I could press him for details, something else he said later that evening lodged in my chest and refused to leave. It gnawed at me, replaying itself until I couldn't tell whether I'd imagined parts of it.
Why did he bring this up like that? He knows how much the past can reopen old wounds that I find unsettling.I kept asking myself until I cried without knowing why I'd started.
He's my father. I love him. But sometimes love doesn't explain everything.
Why now? Why bring up what he did?
Should I let the past go and move forward? Or was I about to be dragged back into a life I thought I'd left behind?