The memory of that nurse lingered long after the discharge papers were signed and the antiseptic smell washed from my skin. His presence had been a small, steady anchor in a sea of fear, his voice a quiet bridge back to myself. When the staff insisted no one by that name had ever worked there, the certainty I’d clung to slipped, leaving me suspended between doubt and wonder.
Then, tucked inside a book I didn’t remember packing, I found the unsigned note. Just a few simple words, written in a hand I couldn’t place, yet echoing the same calm reassurance I’d heard in the dark. I stopped needing to solve it. Whether he was a real nurse, a kind stranger, or something less explainable no longer mattered. What stayed was the feeling: that in my loneliest hours, I had not, in fact, been alone.
