By the time Dmitry got to the hospital to fetch Sabina, it was the dead of night and the clinic was nearly empty.
As he took the elevator to the second floor, the silence weighed on him. Exiting the lift, disoriented, he stared at the room numbers trying to figure out which direction to his wife’s room.
He walked toward the nurse’s station, a bright island in a dark sea. The nurse didn’t even look up as he walked past. He continued down a long corridor, past door after door, all the same, sealing in the sickness within.
The punishing fluorescent lights were giving way to shadowy dread, and he stopped to catch his breath. Haunted by the nocturnal stillness in this liminal place of both healing and death, he was transported back to his last night in Russia.
Following his father’s instruc
