LOGINNicole's POV
The nurse handed the phone to my mother and I heard the shift in the background noise, the particular quiet of a hospital room settling around a voice that was trying to sound like everything was fine.
Fletcher's POVThe doctor came out at two fourteen.I stood up from the chair before she reached me and she held up one hand, the small gesture of someone who had learned that the fastest way to calm a parent was to get to the good news before they could catastrophise into the gap."The fever broke twenty minutes ago," she said. "Her temperature is coming down steadily. We want to keep her overnight for observation but the numbers are moving in the right direction."
Fletcher's POVLoise's fever broke at two in the morning.I was in the chair beside her bed when it happened, watching the monitor the way she had watched it for Nicole, counting the numbers with the focused attention of someone who had decided that counting was the thing they could do and was doing it completely. When the numbers shifted and the nurse came in and checked and looked at me with the expression that meant: we're moving in the right direction, I sat back in the chair and felt something in my chest release that I hadn't fully registered was being held.She was going to be fine.
Fletcher's POVShe had been quiet all day.Not her usual quiet, not the focused inward quiet of a child who was working through something in her head and would surface when she was ready. A different kind. The kind that had a temperature underneath it, that made her movements slower and her eyes less sharp and her drawing pad stay closed on the table beside her untouched from after breakfast until I noticed at three in the afternoon that she hadn't opened it once.I crouched beside her chair.
The room cost sixty dollars a night and had a window that faced the water.That was why I chose it. Not the price, not the distance from the city, not the fact that the woman at the front desk had asked no questions and handed me a key with the indifferent efficiency of someone who had seen enough people arrive at odd hours with one bag to have stopped wondering about the stories. The window. The water outside it, grey and constant and entirely unbothered by anything happening on the shore, and I needed something unbothered near me for a while.I had been here four days.My mother knew I was here. I had called her from the car on the way and
Loise' POVI woke up and she was gone.Not in the way people were gone when they went to the bathroom or the nurses' station or the café down the corridor for something that wasn't the hospital coffee. Gone in the way that had a different quality to it, a stillness in the room that was different from sleeping stillness, the specific absence of a presence that had been there and wasn't anymore.I lay on the cot for a moment and looked at the empty bed.The pillow still had the shape of her head in it.
Nicole's POVI waited until the hospital was at its quietest.That particular hour, somewhere between two and three in the morning, when the corridor outside reduced itself to one set of footsteps doing their rounds and the monitor beside me beeped into a silence that had texture to it, the specific texture of a building that had stopped pretending it was daytime.Fletcher was in the chair.He had fallen asleep in it, which I don't think he had planned to do, his head tipped slightly back and his arms crossed and his face doing the thing it did when he s
8 yaers ago. Flashback volumeLoise’s POVI don’t think I can do this anymore!” I stabbed my pen into the wooden desk of the library to clean my nose bleed.“Shhh!” The librarian warned, but I was too occupied wity rolling the tissue paper into my nose to bother with her.“Are you okay?” Christabel
Another five weeks of unstable moods and overdozing passed before my mom reluctantly let me be admitted. It's been just one day into being an inpatient and I already want ro go home. However, when I remember how much weight she's lost taking care of me. How my crashouts frighten her. How i threa
The circle repeTED itself, three more times befroe I got admitted into the hospital. Before mom relunctantly let me becaome an in-patientr. But even then She and her mom go back home. But on the way, they brancha t the supermarket which is close toa coonstruction sight. She decides to wait in t
Loise’s POVThat was the last time I had piece, becaise aking up let to me recieving the news that I had to be hospitalised emergencya nd I could have easily died if i didn’t get a disganosis immeiately. “I’msorry, BUt i need to return to the library. My group members and istill haven’t found all







