SORAIAH
The drug trolley had a bad wheel.
It had always had a bad wheel. Soraiah had reported it four times — twice on paper, once via the digital system that nobody could agree how to use, and once out loud to a ward manager who had looked directly at her and said “I’ll look into it” with the specific tone of someone who intended to do nothing of the sort. That had been six weeks ago. The wheel still pulled left. The trolley still rattled like it was carrying complaints instead of medication.
Ward 7 was loud today in the way that felt personal. The kind of loud that found you specifically.
Visiting hours had begun eleven minutes ago, and already Soraiah could feel the shift in the air — that particular pressure front that rolled in whenever civilians entered a ward and decided that their love for a patient entitled them to answers from whoever was nearest. She was nearest. She was always nearest. It was, as far as she could determine, her primary skill.
“Nurse.”
She didn’t stop moving.
“Nurse. Excuse me. Nurse.”
The trolley rattled around the corner to Bay C. Soraiah kept her eyes on the medication chart, kept her breathing steady, kept her face in the careful neutral she had spent eight years perfecting. Bed 14. Mr. Okafor. Metoprolol, 50mg.
“Soraiah.”
That one she stopped for. It was Chiamaka, pulling a face that meant junior doctor incoming, brace yourself. Soraiah followed her gaze.
Dr. Fenwick was young enough that he still apologised before asking questions, which Soraiah had once found endearing and now found almost unbearable. He was moving toward her with the particular energy of someone carrying a problem they had decided was actually her problem.
“Soraiah, so sorry — do you know where Mrs. Abara’s family consent form is? I’ve looked everywhere and—”
“Blue folder. Nurse’s station. Behind the printer, not in front of it.”
“Right, yes, brilliant —”
She was already moving again. Bed 14. Mr. Okafor. She had been mid-drug-round for forty-three minutes. She had eaten half a cereal bar at 6:15am and had been pretending not to be hungry since approximately 8:30. Her shoes were NHS-regulation and her feet had long since stopped registering complaints through the normal channels.
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From Bay A, she could hear the woman she’d been mentally calling The Duchess — early sixties, tan coat, absolute conviction that visiting hours were a suggestion for other people — beginning her approach. The voice carried. They always carried.
Soraiah looked at the medication chart. She looked at the trolley. She looked at the corridor stretching ahead of her with its strip lighting and its particular smell of disinfectant and deferred problems.
And then she saw it.
?
It wasn’t a flash of light. It wasn’t a voice from nowhere. It didn’t announce itself with drama or insist on her attention. It simply — appeared. Quiet as a thought she hadn’t chosen to think. Settled at the edge of her vision like it had always been there, waiting for a moment when she wasn’t too busy to notice.
Two options. Clean and simple. Like a message from someone who understood she didn’t have time for paragraphs.
□ TOILET BREAK □
□ CONTINUE DRUG ROUND □
Soraiah blinked.
She looked at Chiamaka, who was busy with a set of obs and not looking back. She looked at Dr. Fenwick, who had already disappeared in the direction of the nurse’s station. She looked at the strip lighting, at the trolley, at the bad wheel that pulled left.
The options waited. Unhurried. Like they had nowhere to be.
From Bay A: “Excuse me, is anyone available?” The Duchess, beginning her descent.
Soraiah’s hand found the trolley handle. Released it.
“Chiamaka,” she said, her voice entirely level. “Kindly cover Bay C for fifteen minutes.”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She walked past the trolley, past Bay A, past The Duchess who turned to speak to her with an expression of profound expectation — and kept walking. Down the corridor. Past the nurses’ station. Through the door marked Staff Only.
The bathroom was small and slightly too warm and smelled of industrial soap. Soraiah locked the door. Stood with her back against it.
The options were still there. Floating at the edge of her vision, patient as ever.
“Alright,” she said quietly, to no one, to nothing, to the impossible thing only she could see. “What are you?”
The options disappeared.
Something else appeared instead. Not a menu. Not a stat screen. Not anything she had words for yet.
Just three words, simple and still, in the same quiet place where her own thoughts lived.
I see you.
Soraiah stood in a bathroom on a ward that asked too much of too few people, in a world that had been quietly catching fire for longer than anyone wanted to admit. Her feet hurt. She hadn’t eaten properly since yesterday. There were forty-seven things waiting for her on the other side of that door.
She read those three words again.
She hadn’t expected that to be the thing that undid her. But her eyes were suddenly, embarrassingly, full.
“Okay,” she whispered. “Okay.”
She had fifteen minutes. She used the toilet, washed her hands, and sat on the closed lid and breathed. Outside, she could distantly hear The Duchess finding someone else to instruct. The ward continued its chaos without her, as wards always do, as they always will.
And in the quiet, for the first time in longer than she could remember, something was simply present with her. Not asking. Not extracting. Not needing anything from her at all.
Just there.
?
