The rain hadn’t stopped since morning.
It slid down the windows of St. Jude’s Hospital in slow, deliberate trails, turning the city outside into a watercolor of gray and gold. Florence was quiet tonight — the kind of hush that settled over the Sant’Ambrogio district when the tourists retreated and the locals stayed tucked indoors with their pasta and wine. But inside the hospital, the silence was heavier. Dense. Waiting.
Nyra Kapoor walked through the fluorescent-lit corridor with the steady pace of someone who couldn’t afford to stop. Sixteen hours on her feet, and still she moved like she was chasing something. Or running from it. Her surgical mask, damp with breath and time, clung to her skin before she finally tugged it down beneath her chin. The scent of antiseptic clung to her like a second skin — sharp, sterile, and oddly comforting.
She passed the window on the east wing, the one with the best view of the city. The wet cobblestones of Via dei Pilastri shimmered under flickering street lamps. Somewhere beyond the rain and rooftops, the Duomo stood like a sentinel in the mist, half-shrouded but still impossibly grand. Nyra paused just long enough to take it in.
Once upon a time, this city had been her dream. Florence, with its art and language and heart — it had represented everything she wanted to escape to. Freedom. A place where she could reinvent herself, where she could be more than the quiet, overachieving daughter of a woman who never stopped worrying.
Her thumb brushed the ID clipped to her scrubs.
Dr. Nyra Kapoor. General Surgery Resident. Year 1.
Nine months in, and she still felt like she was wearing someone else’s name.
“Kapoor.”
Nyra turned to find Dr. Elena Russo striding toward her — purposeful as always, her white coat trailing behind her like a cape. Russo wasn’t warm, exactly, but she wasn’t cold either. Just efficient.
“That ruptured case tonight,” she said, stopping beside her. “You handled it well. You kept your head.”
Nyra nodded. “Thank you.”
“You should sleep. You’re walking like a ghost.”
“I feel like one.”
A rare smile flickered across Russo’s face before she moved on, her heels a soft echo down the corridor.
Nyra watched her go, then turned and slipped into the break room. The couch — the same old thing with peeling vinyl and a dent where every resident seemed to collapse — welcomed her like an old friend. She dropped onto it with a sigh, letting the exhaustion crawl over her limbs like fog.
The coffee she’d abandoned earlier still sat on the table. Cold. Stale. But she drank it anyway.
Her phone lit up with a single message.
Aanya:
“If you don’t text back, I’m flying to Florence and dragging you to a party in stilettos. Don’t test me.”
A soft snort escaped her. Typical Aanya — still the wild one, still trying to pull Nyra out of her shell even across time zones and continents. Her thumb hovered over the keyboard, but she couldn’t find the words. She never could, these days.
She thought of home then — of Mumbai’s chaos, her mother’s cautious voice on the phone every Sunday night.
“Are you eating properly, beta?”
“Don’t overwork. Your father used to… you remember what happened.”
Nyra always remembered.
The long nights in the ICU.
The sound of machines beeping in erratic rhythms.
The quiet moments when the hope in her mother’s eyes dimmed just a little more.
And then, the silence.
She had been seventeen. Old enough to understand mortality, too young to carry it.
She ran her fingers along the seam of the couch, tracing a groove worn smooth by time and tired bodies. Every surface in this hospital seemed touched by fatigue — walls that held secrets, floors that echoed whispered prayers. Florence had become her sanctuary and her crucible, all in one. It stripped her bare and stitched her back together, over and over again.
Tonight had been chaos. A ruptured appendix that spiraled into something worse. She could still feel the resistance of the scalpel in her hand, the way time slowed when the patient’s blood pressure dropped. Russo had stepped in at the right moment, but she’d let Nyra lead. It felt like standing at the edge of a cliff, one wrong move away from tragedy.
She’d done everything by the book. But her hands hadn’t stopped shaking until she was outside the OR.
The hospital hummed quietly around her now. Monitors beeped in distant rooms. A cleaner pushed a mop in lazy arcs down the hall. Somewhere above, the elevator dinged and sighed open. Life moved on in the slow, relentless rhythm of medicine — and death — and healing.
She pulled her hair loose from the ponytail it had been trapped in since dawn, the roots aching with relief. Her scalp felt sore, her bones like they’d been hollowed out and filled with wet cement.
She should call her mother. She knew that. But the thought exhausted her even more. She didn’t have the energy for reassurances tonight. She didn’t want to lie and say she was okay.
Instead, she stood and walked out of the break room, turning right at the end of the hall toward the chapel. No one ever went there this late. Not unless something had gone very, very wrong.
The chapel was small — tucked between radiology and pediatrics like an afterthought. But it was quiet. The kind of quiet that didn’t judge. She slipped inside and sat in the last pew, letting her body slump.
Candles flickered near the altar, tiny flames that danced like they had something to say. Stained glass windows caught the outside streetlights and painted the walls in fractured blues and crimsons.
She didn’t pray. Not really. But she closed her eyes and exhaled.
For a moment, she imagined her father’s voice — deep, steady, always a little amused. “You work too hard, Nyra. You don’t have to carry the world.”
But who else would?
A faint click echoed as the chapel door opened behind her. Nyra didn’t turn around.
“I thought I’d find you here,” said a voice, soft, female, not one she recognized.
Nyra opened her eyes and glanced back.
It was one of the new psych interns. Brunette, American accent. She looked as exhausted as Nyra felt.
“Didn’t mean to interrupt,” the girl added.
“You didn’t.”
The girl nodded, then slipped into a pew near the middle and said nothing more.
They sat in silence, two strangers wrapped in the same invisible heaviness. It felt oddly comforting. Not every connection needed words.
After a while, Nyra stood. Her body ached in protest, but she ignored it.
As she stepped out of the chapel and back into the hallway, the rain had slowed. The windows shimmered with droplets, and beyond them, the world looked almost peaceful.
Florence, for all its beauty, still felt far away sometimes. Like she was moving through it behind glass. But tonight, just for a second, she felt like she was part of it. A thread in its fabric. A whisper in its silence.
And maybe, just maybe, that was enough.
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