5:47 AM

The fluorescent light above me has been flickering for forty-seven minutes. I know this because I have been staring at it for forty-seven minutes, which is the kind of thing you do when you're sitting in a hospital corridor at 5:47 AM in a plastic chair designed by someone who has never met a human spine, wearing a jacket that doesn't belong to you and clutching a phone at twelve percent.

Eleven percent.

The jacket is his. Ethan's. It smells like him — laundry detergent, something vaguely cedar, and the faintest trace of smoke that never fully comes out, no matter how many times you wash it, because he's a firefighter, and smoke is apparently a permanent resident in everything he owns. I pulled it off the back of the chair when they wheeled him past me four hours ago, because my coat was in Sophie's car and Sophie's car was at the bottom of the hill and the hospital was freezing and I was shaking, and at some point survival instincts override social conventions about wearing someone else's clothes.

The sleeves are too long. I've rolled them twice and they still cover my hands. This is not helping me look like a person who has any idea what she's doing.

I do not have any idea what I'm doing.

A door opens somewhere down the corridor. Footsteps — two sets, one brisk and decisive, one shuffling — pass behind me and fade. The fluorescent light gives up for a full two seconds, plunging the ceiling tile above me into darkness, and then returns to its previous state of aggressive uncertainty, as if to say: I'll stop when I want to. Don't get comfortable.

I am not comfortable. I have transcended comfort. I have entered a post-comfort dimension where my lower back has filed a formal complaint and my neck has gone on strike, and the only thing keeping me upright is the vague, persistent thought that if I fall asleep, I might miss something important — a doctor, a nurse, a sign, anything — and then I'll have to explain to someone why I was sleeping instead of vigilantly keeping watch in a hallway where nothing has happened for three hours.

Nobody has asked me to keep watch. Nobody has assigned me this post. I volunteered for it the way you volunteer for things at 2 AM — without thinking, without planning, without considering whether you're the right person for the job, because you're the only person here and the alternative is leaving, and leaving is not a thing my legs will do.

The hospital is quieter than you'd think at this hour. Not silent — hospitals don't do silence, they do layers of sound: the hum of machines you can't see, the distant roll of a cart on linoleum, the occasional muffled conversation in a room two doors down that you can hear just well enough to know it's serious but not well enough to know whether you find that comforting. Two rooms over, or maybe three, someone is crying. Not loud. The kind of crying that's been going on so long it's lost its edges, just a low, wet sound that sinks into the walls and stays there. I don't know who it is. I don't want to know.

✦ ✦ ✦

“Zero... seven... one... four.” A pause. Then, half-slurred: “Don't judge the wallpaper.”

His phone wallpaper was his cats. Of course it was. Poutine glaring at the camera with the face of a creature who has never found a single thing amusing in its entire life, and Bagel mid-yawn, a blur of orange fur that could have been a throw pillow or a very small sun. I'd stared at it for three seconds too long. Then I'd found his mother's number under Maman — with a red heart emoji — and walked into the hallway to make the worst phone call of my life.

Hi, you don't really know me, your son might have mentioned — he's in the hospital — he's okay, I mean he's alive, he's — no, his — I'm — my name is —

I'd made a woman I'd never met cry at one in the morning.

Now it's 5:47 and I'm still here and nobody has asked me to leave. This feels significant, though I can't decide in which direction.

The nurse comes down the corridor. Short. Efficient posture. Short brown hair threaded with grey, the kind of cut that says I don't have time for this to be complicated. Scrubs in the shade of blue that every hospital in this city has collectively agreed means trust me, I do this for a living. Clipboard tucked against her hip like a shield.

She slows when she sees me. Her eyes do a quick, professional scan — the kind of look that takes inventory without seeming rude, though it's always rude, and both of you know it.

“Mademoiselle?”

I sit up. My spine pops in a way that feels medically concerning but is probably just the chair's revenge.

“You're here for Monsieur Morin?”

I nod. There's a dried coffee ring on the floor next to my foot. Someone sat here before me, waiting for their own version of terrible news, and all that's left of them is a brown circle and the vague impression of despair in the seat cushion. I'm inheriting their misery like a timeshare.

“And you are...?” She lifts the clipboard slightly. Pen ready.

There are many things I could say here. I could say friend. I could say his date, kind of, sort of, it's complicated. I could say the woman who was in the car behind the car that hit the ice that sent him sliding down a driveway at 11 PM on a Thursday, which — if we're being precise about causation — makes me at most an adjacent bystander and at least a witness to the exact moment gravity betrayed him.

I could say: he has a fracture. In his pelvis. Which I only know because I Googled pelvic fracture symptoms while he was in imaging, and then immediately wished I hadn't, because Google doesn't believe in subtlety and the diagrams were vivid. He's thirty-one and built like someone whose job involves carrying people out of buildings, and the idea that anything about him could be fractured felt structurally impossible — like hearing that the CN Tower got a stress fracture from standing too long. But also he's afraid of needles, and I know this because he told me on our second date after two glasses of wine, and I haven't said that to his face because I'm not sure we're at the stage where I'm allowed to find his fears endearing out loud.

We have not had the talk. We have not defined anything. We are not officially anything.

But I've been sitting in this corridor since before midnight. I unlocked his phone with a password he gave me while his eyes were crossing from painkillers. I called his mother. I filled out his intake forms with whatever I could remember and made up the rest and hoped nobody would check.

I've done everything a girlfriend would do. I've just never been called one.

The nurse is waiting.

And here's the thing about 5:47 in the morning in a hospital hallway: you don't have the energy for nuance. You don't have the bandwidth to explain well, we've been seeing each other for a few weeks and we haven't really defined— because she doesn't care. She needs a checkbox. She needs someone to call if something changes. She needs a warm body to sign a form.

“Yes,” I say. “I'm his girlfriend.”

The word comes out like I've said it before. Like it's a fact, not a guess. The nurse nods, writes something down, and walks away. I sit back down. The chair doesn't feel any different. The light is still flickering. Sophie's messages are still glowing on my phone at eight percent. But something has shifted. Something I don't have the energy to name. I just told a stranger something that has never been true between us out loud.

And the worst part — the part that's going to keep me up all the nights I'm not already up — is that it didn't feel like a lie.

✦ ✦ ✦

MY PHONE BUZZES. Seven percent.

I almost smile. Almost. My face remembers the shape but can't quite commit.

I should text her back. I should tell her he's stable, that they've done the imaging and he's been moved to a bed — at least that's what the last nurse said, two hours ago, or was it three — that the fracture is bad enough to need surgery but they won't schedule it until the swelling goes down, that he'll need weeks to recover, that everything down there is fine, Sophie, before you ask, because I know you're going to ask.

I should tell her I just told someone I'm his girlfriend.

I don't type any of this.

Partly because my phone is dying. Partly because saying it once was already too much. Partly because Sophie would call me immediately and I'd have to explain it in words, and right now words are a resource I've run out of, along with composure, caffeine, and whatever muscle in your back is responsible for sitting upright.

✦ ✦ ✦

And the thing is — the nurse just now wasn't the first time.

Hours ago, on the phone with Maman Morin — Ethan's mother. You live in Montreal long enough, you stop noticing which language you're in. Conversations switch tracks mid-sentence; half the time nobody registers it happened. Ethan's mother is Québécoise — her English is good, the easy kind that comes from forty years in a bilingual city, but French is where she lives. Where she thinks. Where she prays, probably. And when I called her at one in the morning to tell her that her son was in a hospital bed with a fractured pelvis, her English didn't just slip — it left the building. I could hear it happen: the first few words in English, automatic, polite — and then the crack, and then French pouring through it, fast and raw and scared. So I followed her there. Stumbling through my own French because her fear deserved a language she didn't have to translate, and because at 1 AM with your hands shaking, you meet people where they are, not where's convenient. She'd asked me who I was.

And I'd said it without thinking. Sa copine. No pause. No hesitation. She was crying and I was crying and there was no room for nuance, so the word just fell out of me like a reflex, how you say it's fine when someone bumps into you on the métro.

That was the first time. And it barely registered.

But the nurse — the nurse was different. The nurse was a clipboard and a blank and a quiet hallway and three full seconds where I could have said friend or I don't know or it's complicated. Three seconds where I had every opportunity to tell the truth.

And I said girlfriend anyway. Slower. Clearer. Like I meant it.

The second time wasn't easier. It was realer.

That's the part that scares me. Not the lie. The way the lie is starting to fit. The way my mouth has said it twice now and neither time felt wrong enough to take back.

✦ ✦ ✦

THE CORRIDOR IS DOING that thing that corridors do toward six — emptying out, filling up with different sounds.

Shift change starting to stir somewhere behind the walls. Somewhere down the hall, a vending machine hums a note that clashes with the fluorescent light. A nurse I haven't seen before walks past carrying two coffees and I want to mug her for one of them.

Then: the other nurse. The first one. Clipboard nurse. She rounds the corner and she's walking with purpose now, and my body reads her body language before my brain catches up — a fact changed.

“Mademoiselle?”

I'm already standing. My legs don't cooperate immediately — six hours of that chair have turned my knees into a bureaucratic process — and I sway for a second, grabbing the armrest of the plastic chair, which flexes in a way that inspires zero confidence.

“He's awake.” She's almost smiling, or at least doing the medical-professional version of almost smiling, which involves a slight softening of the eyes and a clipboard angle that's two degrees less defensive. “He's been asking for you.”

He's been asking for you.

Five words. I should be relieved. I am relieved. Somewhere under the exhaustion and the dying phone and the dark smear on my sleeve and the word girlfriend still echoing around inside my ribcage, there is relief.

But there's also this:

He's asking for me. Whatever version of me he thinks is sitting out here. The girlfriend. The one who has it together. The one who called his mother and handled the paperwork and stayed all night.

He doesn't know I lied about what I am to him.

He doesn't know I'm not sure it's a lie.

And here's the thought I can't stop: did she say it? When she went back to check on him, did the nurse say your girlfriend is here? Did she use that word to his face, in his room, while he was lying there doped up and waiting for a surgery he doesn't even know the date of yet? Did he hear it?

Did he correct her?

My legs are awake now. The nurse is holding the door to his hallway open, waiting.

I imagine the room on the other side. The machines. The blankets. Him. Probably still foggy. Probably looking terrible. Probably — if the morphine is still working — looking at me like he looked at me when he gave me his password. That soft, confused, oh, you're still herelook that I'm going to have to deal with while standing next to his hospital bed pretending I belong there.

I walk.

The hallway is short. Twenty steps, maybe. The kind of distance you cover before you've decided whether you're ready.

His door is half open. The light inside is different — warmer, some lamp someone turned on, not the 4100K overhead of the corridor. I can hear a machine beeping in steady rhythm, and the sound is both terrible and the most reassuring thing I've heard all night because it means his heart is doing what hearts are supposed to do.

I push the door the rest of the way open.

I don't know what I am to him.

I said a word in a hallway and I meant it in a way I can't take apart yet, and now I'm walking into his room wearing his jacket and carrying no answers at all.

I go in anyway.