The Moon's Lost Daughter

Nova By the end of a twelve-hour shift, even the lights start to feel tired. The ones above bed fourteen have been humming the same low, tired note for as long as I've worked this floor, and tonight it seems louder than usual, or maybe I'm just the one who's louder inside my own head, running on fumes and the promise of a decent meal waiting for me somewhere that isn't this hospital. I press two fingers to Mrs. Alvarez's wrist and count against the second hand of my watch, more out of habit than real concern at this point. Her pulse is steady. Everything about her is steady, finally, after a week of touch-and-go. "Last one," I say, mostly to myself. Josephine doesn't even glance up from the chart balanced against her forearm. "You say that every shift." "Because it's usually true." "There's always one more, Nova." She finally looks up, one eyebrow lifted in that particular way she has, the one that's equal parts fond and unimpressed after three years of working beside her. "You said the same thing at eleven last week, and then a car accident rolled in at eleven-fifteen." "That was one time." "That was Tuesday." I let go of Mrs. Alvarez's wrist and smile down at her instead of dignifying that with a response. She's already drifting, eyes at half-mast, more asleep than awake. "We'll talk about discharge tomorrow," I tell her, quiet enough not to fully wake her, and she gives me the smallest nod before her eyes fall shut completely. Out in the hallway, Josephine falls into step beside me, her sneakers squeaking against the floor in that same rhythm I could probably pick out of a crowd blindfolded by now. "You look like something that crawled out of a supply closet," she says. "Thank you. I've been on my feet since six." "You always look like this after a double." "I don't have a double. I have a life. Tonight, specifically." I check the time on my phone, and something in my chest lifts despite the exhaustion sitting on my shoulders like a second coat. "I have a date." That gets her full attention. "A date. With who.?" "With Daniel, obviously. Who else would it be?" "I don't know, maybe you've got someone on the side I haven't heard about." "You would be the first to hear about it, and also the person I'd trust least to keep it quiet." She laughs, bumping my shoulder as we near the nurses' station, and then stops walking altogether, turning to face me with a look I recognize as trouble. "Wait. You two set a date yet? For the wedding." "June fourteenth," I say, and I can hear the smile creeping into my own voice before I've even finished the sentence. Her mouth falls open. "Excuse me. That's eight months from now. Why am I only hearing this now?" "Because you've been buried alive in the NICU rotation for two weeks, and I've barely seen you outside a supply closet." "That is not an excuse for keeping a wedding date from me, Nova Ives." "I'll send you everything. Venue, colors, all of it." "You'd better." She points a finger at me, entirely serious despite the grin underneath it. "Or I will hunt you down in that office of yours." "You don't even know where my office is." "I absolutely do." "That's genuinely terrifying." "Good," she says, already walking backward toward the med room, still grinning. "Go home. Shower. Wear something that isn't scrubs, for once in your life." I laugh under my breath and head the opposite direction, toward my office, and for a few seconds, walking through a hallway that smells like antiseptic and burnt coffee, with a monitor beeping steadily behind someone's closed door and a nurse paging someone three floors up, everything about my life feels exactly the way it's supposed to. --- My office isn't much to look at: a desk, two chairs, a computer that takes an unreasonable amount of time to wake up, and one narrow window that looks out over the parking garage instead of anything worth photographing. After a day like today, though, dropping into that chair for even thirty seconds feels like the world handing me a small, undeserved gift. I've barely closed my eyes when my phone buzzes against the desk. Daniel. I answer already, smiling. "Please tell me that means you're five minutes from giving up on me." "I already got us the corner table," he says, laughter in his voice, restaurant noise humming behind him. "The one with the water view." "You know that's my favorite." "I know. That's why I got it." A pause, warm and teasing. "Please tell me you're leaving the hospital and not, say, still sitting in your office." I glance down at my shoe, still hanging half off my foot under the desk. "I am currently in the very serious process of leaving." "Nova." "I'm doing it as we speak." He laughs, and it's such a familiar, easy sound that something in my chest loosens all at once. "Twenty minutes?" "Twenty minutes. I'm basically already in the car." "I'll order your wine. The one that costs more than my dignity." "You're romantic, Daniel Sharma." "I try. See you soon." "See you soon, love." I hang up still smiling, grab my coat off the hook behind the door, and I'm moving before I've even fully stood up. --- The parking garage is nearly empty this time of night, my heels echoing strangely off the concrete as I cross to my car. I toss my bag onto the passenger seat, pull out of my spot, and within minutes I'm on the road, already thinking about the corner table and the wine and absolutely nothing important at all. That's when I see it, a shape at the edge of the road, low to the ground, wrong in a way I can't immediately name. For a second I think it's a pile of clothes someone left behind. Then I see the arm. I slow the car before I've even decided to, hazards flicking on out of pure instinct, and I'm out and moving toward him before I've fully processed what I'm looking at. "Sir?" I drop to my knees in the gravel beside him. He's breathing, but barely, one side of his body twisted at an angle that makes my stomach turn. Blood has soaked clean through his shirt at the side, and there's a gash at his temple, already dark and sticky. I press two fingers to his throat and find a pulse, fast, too fast, and something underneath the rhythm that feels wrong in a way I don't have a name for yet. "Stay with me," I say, though I doubt he can hear me. "I'm a doctor. My name is Nova. You're going to be okay." There's no time to wait for an ambulance. The hospital is four minutes away, maybe less if I run every light between here and there, and something about the way his pulse stutters under my fingers tells me four minutes might already be too many. Getting him into the backseat is the hardest physical thing I've done all week. He's heavier than he looks, dead weight, and by the time I have him laid across the seat with my jacket balled beneath his head, my arms are shaking and there's blood on my hands, my sleeves, the steering wheel. I don't think about Daniel, or the wine, or the twenty minutes I promised. I just drive. --- "I need a trauma bay, now!" I'm shouting before I've even made it through the doors, his arm slung over my shoulder as two orderlies rush toward me with a gurney. "Male, unknown age, found roadside, possible stab or gunshot wound to the left flank, significant blood loss, head laceration, pulse thready and tachycardic." "Dr. Ives…" Tasha's voice cuts off from behind the front desk as she takes in the state of me. "Page Dr. Colt. Trauma two. Now." Everything after that moves too fast to think in complete sentences. Gloves snap. Monitors wake up screaming. Someone cuts through his shirt while someone else searches for a vein. Karen walks in already gloved, already reading the room. "What have we got?" "Unknown male. Roadside. Possible penetrating injury, left flank, plus a head wound." "You brought him in yourself?" "There wasn't time to wait." She doesn't argue with that, just nods once and says, "Let's move," and then there's nothing left in the world except the two of us and the numbers on the monitor and whatever needs to happen next. "Pressure's dropping," Karen says. "I see it." I lean in closer, hands steady even though my heart is not. "He's bleeding internally, somewhere I'm not seeing yet." "Where?" "Give me a second." My eyes move over the field, cataloguing, discarding, until …. "There. Found it. Clamp." She puts it in my hand without hesitation. For a long stretch of minutes there's nothing but our own breathing and the monitor's rhythm, until finally, mercifully, the bleeding slows, then stops. "There," I say, quieter now. "Okay." Karen checks the monitor again. "Pressure's coming back." She looks at me, then at the blood soaking through my scrubs, then back at me. "You're a menace, you know that? A normal person would've called it in and waited." "A normal person wasn't four minutes away." "He's stable for now," she says. "Head injury, blood loss like that …. we watch him closely tonight." "I'll stay." Her eyebrows lift. "Don't you have somewhere to be?" That's when I remember. Daniel. The restaurant. The wine already poured and going warm on a table with a view I'm not sitting in front of. "Oh," I say. Karen's mouth curves. "Exactly." --- I don't even make it back to my office before I pull out my phone. Six missed calls. Three texts, each one a little more worried than the last. He picks up before the first ring finishes. "Nova?" "I'm so sorry." The words come out in a rush, tumbling over each other before he can even ask. "I was already in the car, I swear, but there was a man on the side of the road, hurt badly, and there wasn't time to wait for an ambulance, so I brought him in myself, and I just lost track of everything else." "Breathe. Start from the beginning." I do, all of it, my voice steadying with every sentence until I've told him the whole thing. "Nova," he says, once I've finished. "You saved someone's life tonight. I am not upset that my fiancée is, once again, a superhero in scrubs." Something in my chest eases at the word fiancée ….. even after two months of being engaged, it still warms me every single time he says it out loud. "I still feel terrible." "Don't. Truly. The table isn't going anywhere, and neither is the wine, unfortunately, since I already paid for it." I can hear the smile in his voice, easy and unbothered. "How's the patient?" "Stable. For now. I don't even know his name, no ID on him at all." "Well. Lucky for him you were driving by when you were." "Go take care of your mystery man, Dr. Ives," he says. "I'll see you at home later. And Nova? June fourteenth is still happening. Nothing's changing that." "Nothing's changing that," I echo, smiling even though he can't see it. We hang up, and I sit there a moment in the quiet of my office, my heartbeat finally slowing back toward something normal. He's too good to me. I still don't fully understand what I did to deserve someone who says things like that and actually means them. --- I don't go home. I tell myself I will, in a little while, once I've checked on him one more time. One check turns into two. Two turns into losing track of the clock entirely, until I finally glance at my phone and realize it's well past midnight. I pull the spare blanket out of the bottom drawer of my desk and curl up on the small office couch I've fallen asleep on more times than I'd ever admit to Daniel, my badge still clipped to my scrubs, my phone set to buzz if anyone from trauma two needs me. I don't know his name. I don't know where he came from, or why he was lying on the side of a road no one else seemed to be using tonight. I close my eyes anyway, telling myself I'll ask in the morning, that there's a simple explanation waiting for me once I've had a few hours of sleep to think straight. I'm asleep before I can wonder about it any further.