CHAPTER 1
The hospital is loud in the daytime. At night it pretends to sleep.
Suhailat learned this during her first month on night shift, the way the lights dim but never fully turn off,the way the machines keep breathing even when patients don't. At 2:00am, everything sounds exaggerated, footsteps too close ,doors to slow, silence too deliberate.
Suhailat phone vibrated in the pocket of her scrubs.
She ignored it.Phones were believed to pull your attention away from the ones who needed it and gave it to those who could wait. She adjusted the normal saline for the patient on bed seven and gave the ward a quick assessment,"quiet and stable" she murmured to herself.
The phone vibrated again.
Annoyed now,Suhailat grabbed a chair at the nurses station and sat down,she pulled out her phone,expecting a group chat message or one of her sisters asking if she has eaten.
Instead, she saw a name she hasn't seen in three years.
Mufida Salis
Voice message-1:42
Her mouth went dry
For a moment,she told herself it was a glitch. Old messages resurfaced all the time,phones remember what people try to forget, she stared at the screen, then it lit again when her thumb brushed it.
Mufida was dead. Everyone knew it.."the accident was quick,pianless" they said. Suhailat could not attend the Janaiza(burial) because she was on shift and the other nurses had one excuse or the other and refused to cover for her.
The phone vibrated the third time with another voice note.
Her heart beagn to beat loudly,slowly,as if afraid the sound might escape and be heard,she pressed play
Static.
Then breathing.
"Suhailat….if you are hearing this I didn't make it"
This was definitely mufidas voice,calm,familiar…..hurt.
"They will tell you it was an accident" Mufida continued."it wasn't. Check theatre three records,May 17.
The message paused, "and suhaila you were there",she said softly.
The note ended...
Suhailat dropped the phone. It slid under the shelves. Her mind went blank. She tried to remember the night mufida died. Fluorescent lights. The hiss of machines. Her own hands… steady… calm… on what?
Nothing made sense.
She pressed her back against the cabinet and closed her eyes. The silence of the hospital felt alive. She could hear every faint movement: the distant wheeze of a respirator, the subtle shuffle of a cart in the hallway, the faint hum of the air conditioning. The world had grown sharper, crueler, somehow more observant than she had ever noticed.
Shivers ran down her spine. The voice note shouldn't have existed. Three years. Three years since mufida had died. The very idea of it made her stomach twist, made her feel like she was falling into a dark, bottomless hole she didn't even know existed.
Her fingers itched to play it again, to hear mufida's voice, to search for hidden meaning in every pause, every inflection. But fear held her back. What if she remembered too much?
The lights flickered, casting long, distorted shadows on the walls. For a moment, it felt as though someone—or something—was watching.
Someone—or something—was trying to tell her the truth.
And she wasn't ready to hear it. Or was she?
" I was there??" She kept asking herself as if trying to remember a forgotten memory....