The hospital chapel was small. Tucked away between radiology and a staff break room, it felt like a forgotten part of the building, an afterthought carved from leftover space. There were no stained glass domes, no towering ceilings, and no pipe organ. Just a few pews, flickering candles, and a silence that felt older than the hospital itself.
But to Noelle Reyes, this was the only room in the building that didn't hurt to stand in.
No beeping machines. No sharp scent of bleach. No whiteboards scrawled with dosage schedules and patient numbers.
Just quiet.
Stillness.
Not religious, exactly. Not even spiritual in the traditional sense.
But sacred.
She sat in the second-to-last pew, her back straight from habit but heavy with exhaustion. Her hands were folded loosely in her lap, fingers twined together like she wasn't sure if she was praying or holding herself in place.
The stained-glass window above the altar spilled fractured light across the marble floor, green, gold, violet, like the end of a day poured through colored water.
It was cold in here.
Always too cold.
She had always hated the cold.
Kairo used to tease her for it.
"You dress like Morocco even in January," he'd say, laughing as he shrugged off his coat and wrapped it around her shoulders like a cape. "How are you still surprised the world has weather?"
Now, she wore that memory like armor.
Not the coat that had burned in the wreckage, along with half their lives, but the memory of it, of him, of how effortlessly he had always known when to cover her in warmth, even when she swore she was fine.
Her gaze drifted to the altar.
One candle flickered near the front. Half-burned, trembling inside its glass holder. A fragile kind of hope.
She didn't pray.
Not in any formal way. She didn't bow, or cross herself, or recite memorized lines.
But she believed.
In some things.
In love.
In memory.
In the way silence sometimes feels like someone is listening on the other side of it.
She believed in him.
Especially now.
She hadn't gone into Room 308.
Not yet.
Bea had told her to wait. To let the doctors work through the right steps. To give him time.
But Noelle wasn't afraid of protocol. She wasn't afraid of medical uncertainty.
She was afraid that the next time she said his name… he might not feel it.
That his eyes, those eyes that used to see through every defense she built, might meet hers and hold nothing. No flicker. No pause. No knowing.
She could survive grief.
But being erased by the man who had once loved her without shame?
That might be the one thing she couldn't come back from.
She lowered her head and pressed the pads of her fingers to her forehead.
"I should've made him sign the papers," she whispered.
They'd talked about it, briefly. Legalities. Formalities. All the things that made love acceptable in the eyes of the system.
But Kairo had always hated red tape when it came to the heart. He didn't believe love needed stamps and signatures to mean something.
"Contracts are for companies," he'd said, brushing his thumb over her knuckles. "You're not a transaction, Noelle. You're the only thing I've ever wanted to belong to."
He hadn't needed law to make her his.
And neither had she.
But hospitals didn't believe in memories spoken in candlelight. They believed in forms and checkboxes. They believed in next of kin, and she wasn't one.
Not here.
Not on paper.
Just a woman in a pew. A woman who had given her whole heart to someone now asleep behind a door that wouldn't open for her.
She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees, and spoke low, barely more than breath.
"Hey, Kai…"
Her eyes fluttered closed.
"I don't know if you can hear me. I don't know if anything can. But I'm here. I've been here. Every day. Every hour. Even when they told me I couldn't stay, I stayed. I found corners. I found excuses. I found you."
Her voice cracked, but she didn't cry.
Not yet.
She let herself smile, small and crooked, as a memory surfaced.
"Remember the market in Fez? You couldn't figure out the currency and I kept pretending I knew Arabic to get us free samples? You thought I was fluent until I accidentally ordered twelve kilos of goat cheese."
She let out a soft laugh. It came out half-formed. A little hollow.
"You kissed me that night. Right there in the middle of the souk. People were staring and you didn't care. You said loving me was the only secret you didn't want to keep."
She opened her eyes and looked toward the cross above the altar. Not out of faith, but because the silence felt like it was listening.
"I miss you," she said, her voice lower now. "So much, it hurts to stand up straight."
The tears didn't come all at once. They never did.
They crept down slowly, silent and warm.
She didn't fall apart.
That wasn't who she was.
Noelle Reyes had survived bigger storms than heartbreak. She'd learned how to carry grief like a second skin.
But that didn't mean she stopped bleeding when no one was watching.
She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out the journal.
Leather-bound. Fraying at the corners.
Inside, page after page of her words. Letters she'd written him during his coma. Every entry part confession, part love song, and part lifeline.
She opened to the first page.
And read.
"Day One. You're still asleep. But I talked to your hands today. I remembered how they held me when you didn't know what to say. I wonder if they remember me, too."
She closed the book gently and held it to her chest, the way a child might hold a keepsake long after they'd been told to let go.
Then, just above a whisper, barely carried on breath, she said the words she had promised herself she would say every day until he came back to her.
"I'll wait. However long it takes. I'll wait until your heart remembers what your mind forgot."
And in the stillness that followed, a soft gust of air slipped beneath the chapel door…
…and the candle's flame trembled.