I Want To Go Far Away

The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was the ceiling.

White. Clean. Still.

The second thing I saw was Dee.

He was in the chair beside the bed, elbows on his knees, watching me. He smoothed his expression out the moment my eyes opened but not fast enough. I saw it before he covered it. A man who had been sitting with something heavy for hours and had learned to carry it without showing.

I tried to sit up.

Every nerve in my body refused.

"Don't," he said.

I lay back and let the room come to me slowly. Private facility, not a ward. No shared walls, no trolleys rolling past outside, no overlapping voices from the corridor. Deep quiet, the expensive kind. Someone had splinted my hand and elevated it on a pillow beside me. There was a drip running down my left arm. I read the bag above me the way I always did, out of habit, and whoever had set it up knew exactly what they were doing.

"How long?" I asked. My voice came out rough and strange, like something borrowed.

"Since yesterday evening," Dee said. "You fainted outside the hospital. My team got to you before the ambulance."

Yesterday evening.

I looked out the window. Grey morning light was pressing through the gap in the curtain. I had been out the whole night.

"The hand," I said.

His jaw shifted. "Fourth and fifth metacarpal. Scaphoid. There is nerve involvement." He paused. "The specialist said reconstruction is possible but full restoration of surgical precision—"

"It's not guaranteed," I said.

He did not answer.

I looked at the ceiling and I breathed through it. In through the nose, slowly, the way I coached patients when the news was bad and the body's first instinct was to stop cooperating. I had given that instruction hundreds of times across a bed rail. I had never needed it for myself.

Damian had stood in that living room and looked me in the eye and reached for my wrist and he had known. He had known before his hand closed around mine exactly what he was about to take from me. That was the part I kept coming back to. Not the pain. The intention behind it.

"My phone," I said.

"Lyra."

"Please, Dee."

He reached into his jacket and held it out. I took it with my left hand and looked at the screen and felt the air move out of my chest slowly and completely.

It had gone further than I had let myself imagine. Not just his contacts list. Screenshots on platforms I had never made accounts on, shared and passed between strangers who did not know my name until last night and now had it memorised. My hospital profile was pulled from the staff directory and posted beside images I had never meant for anyone to see. Comments underneath that I read once and closed.

People I had operated on had seen this.

Families I had sat beside in waiting rooms at two in the morning, holding their hands, telling them their person was going to pull through. They had all seen this. They had woken up this morning and opened their phones and seen my face attached to something I had not done and could not take back.

I put the phone face down on the bed.

My eyes were burning. I did not let them go. I had nothing left for tears right now. Whatever was still working inside me I needed for something else.

"The STD panel," I said.

Dee was quiet for a second. "Everything is treatable. You caught it early."

I nodded once.

Treatable. I sat with that word. I was a surgeon. I knew what treatable meant and I knew what it did not mean and I knew the difference between a thing that resolved cleanly and a thing that left a mark even after it was gone.

I thought about three in the morning. The corner of that room. The smell of it. Holding myself because there was no one else to do it and losing something in the dark that I had carried for three days in my coat pocket without telling a soul.

I had not even named it yet. I had not let myself get that far.

I lay there and I breathed and I looked at the window and I thought about what it would mean to walk back out into this city. Its streets. It's hospitals. The people who had all woken up this morning with my face on their screens and a story in their heads that had nothing to do with who I actually was.

I had spent six years building something here. A name people trusted with the thing inside their chest that kept them alive. Six years of early mornings and missed dinners and choosing the hospital over everything else because I believed in what I was doing and I was good at it and it was mine.

One night and it was all attached to something else now. Something I could not scrub off no matter how long I stood in that locker room.

"Dee," I said.

"I'm here."

I turned my head and looked at him. This man who had picked up on the second ring. He had a medical bag ready that he had packed two years ago and never unpacked. Who was sitting in this chair in the early morning with dark circles under his eyes and nothing on his face that looked like obligation?

"I want to leave," I said.

"Okay."

"Not just this room." I kept my voice flat and even. "I want to leave this country. I don't want to be here anymore. I can't walk around this city with my face looking back at me from every screen. I can't go back to that hospital and stand in front of people who have seen those photos and pretend that everything is normal." I stopped. Breathed. "I just want to go somewhere nobody knows who I am."

He looked at me for a moment without speaking.

"I know somewhere," he said. "Quiet. Good medical facilities. People I trust completely."

"How far?"

"Far enough that nobody will be looking for you there."

I looked at my hand on the pillow beside me. The splint. The swelling is visible even underneath the bandaging. Those fingers that had been inside living hearts and had never once let anyone down on a table.

I thought about the first surgery I had ever done alone. Twenty-six years old, terrified underneath a calm I had rehearsed for weeks, and the moment the attending stepped back and said it's yours. The way my hands had moved like they already knew. Like they had been waiting their whole life for exactly that moment.

I turned my face back to the ceiling.

"Can we leave tonight?" I asked.

"I'll make the call right now," he said.

"Don't tell anyone where we're going."

"I wasn't going to."

"Not even your people."

"Lyra." His voice was quiet. "I know."

I nodded.

I closed my eyes.

Outside the window the city was already moving, already loud, already going about its morning without any idea that I was lying in this room deciding to stop being part of it. Buses and voices and the distant sound of traffic that had never once paused for anyone's worst night.

I had loved this city once.

I had walked its streets at six in the morning after long shifts and felt proud to be part of it. Proud of what I did inside it. Proud of my name and what it meant.

That woman felt very far away now.

"Tonight," Dee said, standing. "Get some rest first."

I did not answer him.

I lay still and I breathed and I let the ceiling be the only thing in front of me.

It was enough for now.