One More

The pain doesn’t come. It detonates.

Every nerve ending I own catches fire at once, and I’m arching off the bed as if possessed by something unholy. Like something inside me is trying to leave its own skin. The sound that comes out of me isn’t a scream. It’s older than that. It’s the sound of a body that has finally given up.

“Sarah, can you hear me?” Dr. Hodgins asks somewhere in the blur of blue scrubs and fluorescent haze. “Sarah, you’re almost there. One more.”

One more.

One more!

Are you fucking kidding me?

I almost laugh. I almost split apart laughing because he doesn’t understand. There is no more. I have given every single thing this body contains. I have endured until my vision went white. Until I tasted copper. Until my hands shook so badly Alex had to pry them from the bed rail. I have been hollowed out. Scraped clean. I am a burning, shaking corpse. My legs are trembling like they belong to someone else. Someone I used to be before this purgatory.

I have nothing left.

I know it the way I know my own name. The way I knew, at seven years old, which footsteps on the stairs meant hide and which meant dinner. There is nothing left inside me to give.

“I can’t.”

It comes out quiet. A whisper swallowed by the beeping monitors and the rushing in my own ears. “I can’t. Please, stop it. I can’t do it anymore.”

The room tilts. The ceiling tiles blur into a smear of white. I can’t feel my fingers anymore. I can’t feel anything except this immense crushing pressure that has replaced my center. And all I can think is: I’m done. I can’t. I won’t.

“Sarah. Hey. Look at me, baby.”

Alex.

His hand finds my face. His palm is cool and steady against my jaw, and I want to bite it. I want to sink my teeth into the meat of his thumb because his voice is so goddamn even. So measured. Like he’s walking me through a differential diagnosis instead of watching me come apart.

“You can, I know you can do this. One more and—”

Shut up.

The thought is so violent it nearly makes it past my teeth.

Shut up, shut up, shut up.

But he leans closer. Close enough that his forehead nearly touches mine. Close enough that I can smell the coffee on his breath, the antiseptic on his collar, the faint trace of the soap he used this morning when the world was still whole and I was still a person who believed she could do this.

“I love you,” he says.

It’s not “you’ve got this, baby.” It’s not the voice he uses when he’s coaching me through a panic attack or talking me down from the edge of some catastrophic thought spiral at 3 a.m.

He says it like a promise. Like a vow renewed in blood and sweat. Like he’s gripping the rim of my entire world with both hands so it doesn’t cave inward and swallow me whole.

I love you.

And something inside me turns.

Not softens, no. Turns. Like a key in a lock. Like a blade finding its angle.

The anger doesn’t leave. It doesn’t dissolve. It catches. It ignites. Because he’s crying. Alex is crying. He never cries.

Not since his mother’s funeral. Not since the night he told me about the kid he lost in the OR, the six-year-old with the brain bleed, the one whose name he still can’t say out loud.

He’s crying, and his hand is shaking against my jaw. And I realize—he’s terrified too. He’s not the surgeon right now. He’s not the man with steady hands and a plan. He’s just Alex. Just a man watching the woman he loves burn alive, and he can’t fix it.

I will not end here on this table.

“I can see it,” Dr. Hodgins says. “I can see the—”

Oh God.

Oh God.

The room goes silent. Or maybe my mind does. Suddenly, the pain doesn’t matter. The exhaustion doesn’t matter. It’s real. It’s happening right now. Right this second. And I am not ready. I am so catastrophically not ready.

Because what if I’m her?

I can see it. The future. The terrible one.

I see it. As clear as a photograph burned into the back of my eyelids. Me, standing in a kitchen that looks nothing like hers but smells the same—stale and sharp with resentment.

I see myself turning away from a cry. I see myself with her mask, the one that said you are not worth the effort of emotion. Cold. Distant. Wrong in the exact same way she was wrong. Carrying the same poison in my blood like an inheritance I never wanted.

I see myself becoming the thing I’ve spent twelve years running from.

I can’t breathe. My throat closes. My fingers claw at the sheet beneath me. I’m not in the hospital anymore. I’m seven. I’m crouched behind a door. I’m watching the shadow of her feet pass back and forth. Back and forth. Deciding.

I’m choking. I feel her fingers around my windpipe, and I can’t swallow.

Then the pressure shifts.

It shifts, and the world cracks open. And suddenly, my body is doing something I didn’t authorize. Something ancient and unstoppable. So far beyond my control.

My spine bows. My jaw locks. Every muscle I own contracts into a single, impossible point of force.

And I’m not seven anymore.

I am thirty. I am here. I am in this room. I am on this bed. I am alive.

And I see him.

Not this Alex. The first one. Me at eighteen years old, bleeding out on a gurney. My mother’s kitchen knife still in my stomach. And there he was. Younger. Saying something—Stay with me, stay with me. He saved me before he ever loved me.

The monitor beeps. And suddenly I’m not on the gurney anymore. I’m standing in the bathroom. Our bathroom. The tiles cold under my bare feet. The microwave in the kitchen had finished heating the mug of water. And I’m staring at the impossibility turned real.

The antiseptic burns my nostrils and then—it doesn’t. It shifts. Becomes something else. Something sweeter. Hopeful.

Fresh paint.

I’m standing in the doorway of the room at the end of the hall. The one we refused to name. Alex is on his knees with a roller in his hand, streaking up the wall in uneven lines. Grinning.

The room snaps back. Fluorescent. Beeping. Screaming. Me. I’m the one screaming.

The pain peaks into something beyond pain. Beyond language. Beyond anything I have ever felt or feared or survived. It is primal. A tearing. I am coming apart. I am sure of it. I will break. I will shatter into pieces on this bed, and they will have to sweep me into a bag and send me home in fragments.

“Sarah.”

Alex’s hand clamps around mine. Not gentle. Not careful. He grips me like I’m falling off the edge of something, and his fingers are the only thing between me and the black.

“Sarah.”

He says my name like it’s a rope.

I grab it.

I grab it with every year, every scar, every night I slept on the floor, every morning I chose to stay alive out of spite. I grab it with the fingers that traced two thin bars in disbelief. With the palms that pressed against a wall to see if the paint was dry.

I grab it, and I don’t stop.

Not because I can. But because I can’t not. Because my body has become a storm wearing my skin. And it doesn’t care about my permission. It doesn’t care about my fear. About the woman in the kitchen or the shadow of her feet. Or the knife. Or the scars.

Alex’s bones grind. I’m crushing his hand. I know I’m crushing his hand because somewhere far away I hear him make a sound—not pain, not quite—but I can’t stop. I can’t let go. If I let go, I will flow apart. If I let go, there will be nothing holding me to this earth.

And suddenly, I feel it leave me.

The weight. The pressure. The entire universe that has been living inside my body leaves. It slides free in a rush of heat and wet, and I collapse backward like a puppet with its strings cut. My skull hits the pillow. My hands fall open. My legs go slack.

Gone.

It’s all gone. The pain. The fire.

And without it, I am formless. Shapeless.

I don’t know who I am without it.

The silence stretches. A second. Two. Ten. A lifetime compressed into the space between one monitor beep and the next. The room is frozen. Dr. Hodgins is a statue in blue. The nurse beside him has her hands extended, cupped around something I can’t see.

Alex’s grip on my fingers has gone slack. His mouth half-open. His eyes fixed on a point beyond my feet where the world has rearranged itself without my consent.

And then—

A cry.

Thin. Ragged. Furious. The most outraged, indignant, alive sound I have ever heard. It sounds like a declaration. Like a tiny set of lungs screaming, I’m here, I’m here, I exist. It tears through the silence like a fist through paper, and the room lurches back into motion.

Color returns. Sound returns. The beeping. The murmur of nurses. The clatter of instruments on steel trays. All of it rushing in at once.

I turn my head.

It’s involuntary. Like breathing. Like the cry still splitting the air.

And there he is.

Alex.

His face is wrecked. Completely, utterly wrecked. The composure he wears like armor—gone. The clinical detachment he hides behind—gone. Every wall he has ever built has crumbled, and what’s left is just—

Him.

His eyes are wide. Wider than I’ve ever seen them. Wet and shining and fixed on the squirming, furious thing the nurse is lifting into the light. His mouth is open, but nothing comes out. His jaw works once. Twice. Nothing. The man who always has the right phrase, the precise term, the measured response, has no word for this.

And his hand. His hand still in mine. The one I nearly shattered. It’s trembling.

He looks at me.

His eyes find mine, and the world narrows to a single point. To him. To me.

And I see it.

Awe. Unpolished, unmeasured, unprocessed awe.

He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to.

I know that look.

I have never seen it before, but I know it the way I know the sound of rain. The way I know the weight of his arm across my waist at 4 a.m.

It is love so enormous it has broken his face open. Love that has no clinical term. No diagnosis code. No treatment protocol.

He loves me, and he loves the screaming thing they are placing on my chest. And he doesn’t have the engineering to contain it.

I look down.

I look at this warm, slick, impossible small body. No bigger than a loaf of bread. And I feel the cry vibrate through my ribs like it started inside me. Like it’s still mine. My hands come up. Shaking, wrecked, useless. And they curve around this tiny, furious creature. And the moment my palms make contact with skin, I know.

I will never be like her.