The Year I Stopped Being His novel Chapter 374

The next morning, when Sloane woke up, the hospital room was completely silent.

It wasn't her usual kind of quiet.

Usually, when she woke, she would hear the rustle of Garrison flipping through her medical chart, or the low murmur of his voice giving instructions to a nurse, or the faint tapping of his fingers on a tablet screen as he sat in the chair by her bed. Those sounds were subtle but ever-present, forming a steady, comforting background noise that anchored every morning.

Today, there was nothing.

She turned her head to look at the chair.

It was empty. Garrison's white coat was draped neatly over the armrest, looking as though it hadn't been touched since last night. The blackout curtains weren't entirely drawn, and a sliver of sunlight slashed through the gap, glaring brightly against the sheets at the foot of her bed.

The IV bottle was completely empty.

Sloane glanced up at the IV stand. There was an air pocket in the transparent tubing, the fluid having stopped about three inches below the drip chamber. She frowned—usually, the nurses would come in a few minutes early to swap out the medication, never letting the bottle run dry.

She pressed the call button by her bed.

No response.

There was some kind of noise coming from the hallway—muffled, filtered through a few closed doors, making it hard to make out. It wasn't the usual clatter of a supply cart rolling over the tiles, nor the overlapping chatter of nurses changing shifts. It was a chaotic, fragmented hum, like a crowd murmuring all at once, buzzing like a disturbed beehive.

Sloane sat up, slid her bare feet into her slippers, pulled her hospital gown tight, and pushed the door open.

The hallway was empty.

No, there were people, but none of them were at their posts.

The medication window was vacant. Behind the nurses' station, an empty swivel chair slowly rotated, a forgotten shawl draped over its back. At the far end of the corridor by the window, four or five nurses and two doctors in white coats were crowded together, shoulder to shoulder, craning their necks to look outside.

"Ugh..." Someone at the nurses' station let out a long, trembling sigh. "But when they carried her away just now, she was wearing a nurse's uniform, wasn't she? Her whole back was soaked in blood. Why would she wear a nurse's uniform to kill herself?"

No one had an answer to that.

Sloane walked over to the window, hovering at the edge of the group, and peered through the gap between two nurses.

The window looked straight down into the inpatient garden. She saw the sycamore tree, the cobblestone path she had strolled along just yesterday, the white bench—and then she saw the stain on the grass in front of it.

It was a dark, muddy red, already oxidizing black in the morning sun, its edges seeping into the roots of the grass and the cracks in the dirt.

The back doors of an ambulance slammed shut with a heavy thud. She couldn't see who was inside; she only saw the white doors close, the blue lights on the roof flashing silently once before turning off.

With no sirens blaring, the vehicle quietly pulled out of the garden's wrought-iron gates and vanished around the street corner.