Fourteen days inside a hospital room don’t move like normal time. They stretch, blur, and repeat themselves until you stop counting hours and start counting breaths—the mechanical kind, pushed in and out by a machine. That’s how I measured everything. Mark lay in the bed, still as if life had simply paused him mid-sentence. I held his hand so often my fingers felt numb, whispering the same quiet plea again and again. “Please… come back to me.” Nothing changed. Leo barely left his chair. He sat there with his small blue backpack pressed against his chest like it held something...
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