Damian
Watching Elara sleep in the hospital bed should have been simple.
She was just a patient. Someone I had brought in because she was sick and incapable of properly taking care of herself in that moment.
That was all it should have been. Except it wasn't. Because even while she slept, her presence didn't feel neutral. It felt personal.
I sat in the chair beside her bed, my eyes occasionally drifting back to her face as if checking whether she was still breathing normally, whether the medication was working, whether she was getting worse instead of better.
None of those thoughts were strictly necessary for a doctor. They were the kind of thoughts I would have dismissed in any other context. Yet here I was.
And the most irritating part of it all was that I knew exactl
