J(

For the past few months, you’d been spending nearly every day in your father’s hospital—not as a doctor, but as a volunteer. It was supposed to be temporary. Something to do while you figured out what came next after graduating with a literature degree. Instead, it had become a routine you couldn’t seem to escape: long corridors that smelled of antiseptic, quiet wards filled with half-finished conversations, and patients who learned your footsteps by sound alone.