The hospital smelled sterile.
Cold. Metallic. Sharp.
It made the boy's stomach twist. He sat on a small chair
outside the delivery room, feet dangling, fingers
clutching the edge of the plastic seat.
He shouldn't have been here. He wasn't allowed in the
"serious" rooms. But he had insisted, following his
parents, walking quietly behind them like a shadow
that shouldn't exist.
His mother's hand rested on his father's arm. Her eyes,
usually warm and soft, were hollow, empty. She smiled
at him once, weakly, and he returned it. It didn't reach
his chest.
The boy's thoughts drifted back to the drawings he had
destroyed the night before. The broken pencil. The
page that had almost bled.
A scream tore through the corridor. High-pitched. Human. Fragile.
He jumped, stomach sinking, heart hammering.
Then silence. A quiet so dense it pressed against his eardrums.
His mother emerged first, eyes red, lips trembling.
His father followed, face pale, voice brittle.
"The baby… didn't make it," his mother whispered.
The boy froze.
The words didn't touch him at first.
Then the ache began—starting in his chest, shooting up
to his jaw, exploding behind his eyes.
Pain unlike any he had known before.
He felt it not just in his body, but in the very center of
himself, where the girl's presence had always been
faint but warm.
Now it was gone.
Or worse—snatched away. He screamed.
It wasn't a child's scream. It was guttural, raw, echoing
through the empty hospital corridor.
"No! No!" he shouted, tears pouring freely.
His parents froze. The nurses glanced over, startled, but
he didn't care.
He fell to his knees, clutching his head as though he
could hold the world together with his hands. "Why?" he howled. "Why?! You were supposed to be
here!"
Hours passed—or maybe minutes. Time had no
meaning in the crushing, endless pain of that day.
The boy couldn't tell the difference between himself
and the absence that filled the room.
Everything was muted. The hum of the fluorescent
lights. The footsteps in the hallway. Even the broken
lines in his mind, the pulsing pressure behind his eye—
everything felt muted, flattened, hollowed by the loss.
That night, in his bedroom, he sat on the floor, knees to
his chest, staring at the empty notebook.
All the drawings had been destroyed in a desperate
attempt to erase what had never been.
But still, the pain lingered. A whisper. Not of sound, but of memory.
A warmth that should not have existed.
A faint pulse—like a heartbeat that didn't belong to
him.
He buried his face in his hands, sobbing.
"I'm sorry," he whispered. And he meant it—not just for what had happened, but
for being alive when she was not.
Later, he dared to look at the notebook again.
One page remained untouched—a faint outline,
blurred but recognizable.
Her eyes stared back at him, open this time.
The boy flinched.
It shouldn't have been there.
It shouldn't exist.
And yet… it did.
The air in his room felt different after that.
Darker.
Heavier.
Charged with something he could not yet understand. A presence lingered where she should have been.
Watching. Waiting.
And the boy knew one thing:
He had not lost her entirely.
He had only just begun to feel the weight of what
remained.