Page 21 of Seven Minutes
My mind moved automatically, cataloging every step, every name. Patel was on call tonight. He had steady hands and over fifteen years of training. If anesthesia moved fast enough, if vascular was paged in time?—
If.
Someone said something about updates, about waiting, abouttime.
Time.
As if that word hadn’t just shattered inside my chest when I thought it had run out.
I stood there, half in the hallway, half out of my own body. The floor tilted, the edges of the world razor-sharp and blindingly bright. I should have been scrubbing in, standing over the table beside them, telling them what to do, making sure they didn’t miss anything. But instead, I was the man they were pushing aside. The family. Theother.
I’d handed off the person I loved most in the world to my colleagues like another case file. And now there was nothing left to do but trust them, but goddamn, trust had never felt this impossible.
The automatic doors hissed shut, sealing Eli behind them. That small sound rang louder than a death knell. I took one step back and another until the wall found me first. Gravity collapsed until my hands hit the cold floor, fingers curling against it like maybe I could feel his pulse there, buried somewhere under the white noise and chaos.
He was in the best possible hands.
I repeated it like a prayer, but the words kept sticking. Because every doctor knows sometimes the best hands still lose.
Breathe, stay upright, remember your training. Doctors don’t panic. Doctorsact.
But the air in my lungs turned to glass. Every inhale scraped. Every exhale came too late. My hands—these same hands that had stitched arteries, reset bones, shocked hearts back to life—hung useless at my sides. All that knowledge, all that control, meant nothing now. I couldn’t scrub in, couldn’t call the shots, couldn’t do a damn thing to stop the clock from moving without him.
I could see it so clearly in my mind’s eye—the bright lights of OR Two, the sterile fields, the mechanical hum of the monitors. Patel barking orders, the anesthesiologist counting off vitals, a nurse suctioning blood that shouldn’t have been there. The rhythm of chaos I’d lived in for years. Only now it washimon that table, and the familiarity of it turned cruel.
Someone touched my arm. Said something about the family waiting area. Their voices stretched from the end of a long tunnel. I nodded, because that’s what you do when your world ends in public: you nod so people don’t realize you’re disintegrating.
The hallway swam. Sounds bled together into one long beep that mimicked the flatline earlier.
I found an empty alcove near the vending machines and sank into a chair.
All my life, I’d believed in intervention—in skill, in timing, in doing. But sitting there, listening to the distant squeak of gurney wheels and the muffled rush of voices I knew too well, I understood something awful: there’s no protocol for this. No handbook for standing still while the love of your life fights to come back to you.
Powerlessness wasn’t an emotion. It was a body. It lived in my muscles, my bones, my throat. It was a second heartbeat buzzing beneath my skin.
For the first time in my career, I prayed—not for skill, or clarity, or strength.
Just forone more chance.
Somewhere down the corridor, someone laughed, and the sound cracked something open inside me. Footstepsapproached. I didn’t look up. Couldn’t. The tiles between my shoes blurred into a smear of white and shadow.
“Adrian?”
The voice registered a second before I placed it—Mara, from trauma. Tuesday night shifts, three years of awful coffee and shared exhaustion. She crouched into my peripheral vision, still in her scrubs, surgical cap pushed back to reveal a streak of blood across her cheek.
“Hey,” she murmured. “You shouldn’t be alone right now.”
I wanted to answer. Wanted to tell her I wasn’t alone, not really, because he was still here, somewhere behind those double doors, under those lights, but the words stuck, thick and useless in my throat. If I tried to voice them, all that would spill out would be grief and regret.
She must’ve seen it in my face because she didn’t press. She just eased down beside me. Close enough that her shoulder brushed mine. Close enough to remind me that the world still contained warmth.
We sat there in a silence that felt heavy but necessary.
Around us, the hospital carried on—pages crackling through the intercom, monitors beeping faintly through the walls, the clatter of a rolling cart. All of it so horribly ordinary, while my pulse thundered so loud it drowned the world out.
Mara slipped a small paper cup of water into my hands at some point. I hadn’t even noticed her leave or return. The water trembled as I tried to drink.
“He’s in excellent hands,” she said finally. She was reminding herself as much as me.
