For days she lay at the cot by his bed, just listening to his breathing and hearing the foreboding bells of the hospital rush around her. Her fingers twined interlocked with his but he didn’t know, he couldn’t feel. Nothing and no one could move her.
Only food force-fed when her mother found her, after running away from home. Water as the tears of her coming grief. Then only silence when she left. In, out, in, out. His breathing, perfectly in sync with hers.
“Miss, please get up. The nurses are started to get concerned. Miss please!” She pictured him in her mind, a middle aged French man-a doctor-with a force-grown beard and half moustache. She didn’t move a muscle.
“Miss you must give up hope. His body is lit up like a Christmas tree.”
How could she not lie by his side, when she knew what she had done?
She attempted to stand, to tell this man that her hope was a tsunami on the coast of her life, crushing her spirit until his was restored. Her fingers found the edge of the bed with her sharp, clawing fingernails gripping for support. A step, another, now halfway horizontal to the bed, she let go. Another step on the slippery tiled floor under her bare feet, sticky and unforgiving. She promptly fell, not losing her aura of calm and keeping her clouded, milky blue eyes shut. No need to horrify yet another doc. The rustle of a medical coat and she knew that he was going to offer her help, that she would not take and he would ask why. Then he too would find out. She could not find her words.


A week later her body was half-starved and screaming curses with even a twitch of her eyebrow, but the tsunami was still raging on. The eerie crickety calm of night started to sink into the metal bones of the hospital. Creaking and groaning it complained, casting a gloomy shadow over her heart.
And then all was disturbed.
The door slammed open, pounding feet shaking her cot and a sinking dread in the pit of her stomach. Beeps and the hiss of wires being plugged together and shot into his skin. With her sixth sense for him she knew it was no good.
Stumbling without a hand to guide her, she found the lying smooth plastic curtains and yanked them aside, wishing she could see the howling moon as she tore them from their rods with her rage. At herself.
He hadn’t died of cancer.
She had killed him.
For she was positive he had died of a broken heart.