Checkered Hearts
He stared at the monitor through the open door—Theo's heart rate, oxygen saturation, blood pressure, all rendered in green lines that jumped and settled like the telemetry from a car he couldn't drive.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
Not the clean spike of a racing heartbeat. The messy, biological rhythm of a body trying to remember how to be alive.
Arthur hated hospitals. The smell, specifically—that particular combination of floor wax and decay that no amount of ventilation could remove. It reminded him of their mother, who had died slowly in a room like Theo's, surrounded by machines that measured her departure in incremental silence.