Page 37 of Seven Minutes
It was him. Always him.
Eli, with his stubbornness and warmth and ability to make chaos feel like home.
Eli, who could stop my shaking with a touch.
And now here I was, trying to hold together a world that only existed when he was in it. I thought of that day in ourkitchen. The tremor in my hands. His voice saying,You don’t have to hold everything together for me.
“I’m still holding on, Eli,” I murmured, throat thick. “But I don’t know how to do this without you.”
I sat there, in the space between then and now, between medicine and memory, waiting for someone to tell me how to keep what was left of him safe.
The nurse glanced up at me through the window. “We’re almost done.”
I nodded again, but my vision blurred. My reflection stared back from the glass—eyes rimmed red, scruff thickening to a beard, a man who knew too much about what could go wrong.
When the table finally slid out, I had to grip the doorframe to keep from collapsing. I told myself to breathe, to stay clinical, to wait for the report. But inside, every second balanced on a wire stretched between hope and despair.
“He’s going to be fine,” I whispered. “He has to be.”
They wheeled Eli back to his room, and I followed, heart hammering, eyes locked on the rhythm of his chest. It took nearly twenty minutes to transfer leads and tubing and get him situated. One attending lingered at the foot of the bed, clipboard tucked under an arm.
“The swelling has lessened,” she said, and I nodded, swallowing hard.
“Now what?” I asked, although I already knew the answer.
“Now… we wait and see,” she replied softly.
The words hung in the air, almost cruel in their simplicity. I wanted them to mean more, to guarantee something. To tell me that when I blinked, Eli would open his eyes and smile likehe always did, the way he had in our kitchen, laughing through tears, shaking his head at my overblown panic. But hope didn’t come with guarantees.
I watched him, tracing the curve of his jaw, the slope of his shoulders beneath the sheets. I wanted to believe “wait and see” meantwait and heal.But I’d said those words before. I knew how easily they turned into waiting and losing.
I squeezed his hand lightly and whispered into the quiet: “I’m right here. I’m not leaving you. Not now. Not ever.”
For the first time in days, I let myself hope, even if it was fragile, a candle flickering against the darkness.
Part Four
The Return
Chapter 18
The Space Between
ELI
Something vibrated just beyond reach. Not quite sound, not quite silence. More like the world testing itself, remembering how to move again.
A pattern emerged. A rise. A fall. A held breath.
For a while, I mistook it for my own—something internal, something mine—until it pressed in from the outside, surrounding me. Distant. Muffled. Like listening to a song through water, the shape of it is there but just out of grasp.
My chest tightened.
I tried to take a breath, but something fought me. A tube? A weight in my throat? I gagged, panic blooming before I even knew why. My hands wouldn’t move. I tried again, but nothing happened. My body's functions ceased, one limb at a time.
Then—
A sound cut throughthe fog.
