Page 244 of The Night Shift

“Holly, those two things aren’t mutually exclusive. You don’t have to bleed to prove you’re brave. You don’t have to suffer to deserve peace. Being happy doesn’t make you weak. You can let yourself have joy without flinching.”

“You don’t get it.”

“No, I do, actually. You’re in love again. Which means you’re scared again. But that’s not a weakness, Holly. Because to love someone, to truly love someone is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them. That’s strength. You’re not fragile. You’re relentless.” Her voice quietens, almost reverent. “And as for the rest, I hope you know he didn’t save you.Youdid that. You clawed your way out. You stitched yourself back together. He may have been the light, butyouwere the one who kept walking through the dark. So if, god forbid, the worst happens, you will survive it. Not because you’ll want to. But because that’s just what you do. You survive. You always have.”

A beat.

“Some people are just made of fire. You were forged in it. Don’t ever forget that.”

More tears slip out, and I’m too exhausted to wipe them away.“I really thought I was going to see him die in front of me.At the warehouse. I don’t know how that axe didn’t hit him. It was aimed for him, and then, at the last second, it switched to Cami. I don’t know how that happened.”

Audrey tilts her head slightly, watching me with something akin to amusement. “Magic, maybe?”

I cough out a laugh. “There’s no such thing.”

Audrey smiles. “Luck, then?”

“Maybe,” I murmur. An ice-cold breeze whooshes past. I audibly shiver.

“Oh, here. Take this,” she says gently, already slipping off her coat. She lifts her arms to shrug it off, and that’s when I see it — the delicate outline of a butterfly tattoo on her right shoulder, barely visible beneath the strap of her blouse.

“What’s that?”

Audrey pauses mid-motion, her hand lingering over the fabric of her coat. Her gaze flicks down to her shoulder, then back to me. “A tattoo,” she says, her voice taking on an unexpected edge.

I feel something stir in my chest. An uncomfortable, disorienting feeling like I’ve seen that before.Have I?

Audrey looks at me for a long moment, as if considering how to answer. There’s something sad in her expression now, something buried deep. “Yes, you have,” she replies, the sadness in her smile heavy and familiar.

I stare harder at her. The way the moonlight hits her skin wrong — like her features have been blurred, like someone’s smudged her edges with their thumb. My stomach knots. “How?”

“I think you know already.”

“No, I don’t,” I whisper, my voice faltering, unsure. There’s a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Audrey watches me quietly, her eyes glistening with something that looks like tears, but isn’t. It catches the light, glittering like the stars in the night sky. Ethereal.

“Yeah, you do,” she says. “You’ve always known. From the start.”

From the start?

A small wooden door creaks open inside me.

My gaze drifts. Her face gets more blurry around the edges now. Not visibly, not really, but I feel myself remembering her in real time, only to realize that I’ve always been remembering her in real time.

It hits me like a freight train.

“Time of death, nine forty-seven p.m.”

The patient. A twenty-four-year-old sexual assault victim. Multiple trauma wounds to her stomach. Exploratory laparotomy. Potential abdominal sepsis. Several broken ribs. Major intestinal damage. Internal hemorrhage. Face was bruised and disfigured beyond recognition. The only distinguishable mark on her body that still remains is a tiny butterfly-shaped tattoo on her right shoulder.

“It’s you,” I murmur. “You’re…you’re the girl I couldn’t save. Y-you were in the OR that night.”

There’s a long silence.

Audrey nods.

“And I was the one who…” I trail off. Swallow. My throat burns. “You didn’t make it.”