The fluorescent lights above her hummed like they were mocking her. Cold, detached, their flickering glare indifferent to the chaos unfurling inside her chest.
Amara squinted at the ceiling, lashes fluttering as her eyes adjusted to the clinical brightness. Her throat felt like it had been scrubbed with sandpaper, dry and raw. Her chest ached with the weight of questions she didn't have the strength to ask.
The sterile hospital air wrapped around her stiff, suffocating, scented faintly of bleach and something more metallic, like forgotten blood or ghosts that hadn't moved on.
She'd been awake for a while now, long enough to count the cracks in the ceiling tiles and memorize the rhythm of the monitor beside her.
She had no clue to how she ended up here. No flashback at all. Her body ached from the inside out, every muscle humming with a quiet, bruised pain, like she'd been dragged through a storm and left out to dry.
On the bedside table, a small glass vase held a bouquet of white lilies, their petals too pristine to feel real. The sight of them sent a chill through her. She hated lilies. They were the kind of flower people chose when they didn't know what else to say. The kind of flower people buried with the dead.
A soft knock came at the door before it opened. A nurse peeked in, her face kind but cautious, like she wasn't sure what version of Amara she'd find today.
"You're awake," the nurse said, stepping in with a clipboard. "That's good. You've been out for nearly two days."
"Two days?" Amara's voice cracked. "What happened to me?"
"Lightning storm. You were found unconscious outside your apartment building. No signs of trauma. Just… out cold."
Amara blinked. "That's impossible. I don't remember anything."
The nurse stood at the foot of the bed, scribbling something onto a clipboard, her pen scratching softly against paper. "No head injury," she said without looking up. "Your scans are clean. Nothing broken, no trauma. Your body's just reacting like it's been through a shock. But you're stable now."
Amara didn't feel stable. Not even close.
The nurse gave her a soft smile and turned to leave, but paused. "Someone named Mr. Talbot signed your forms and our emergency contact. He said he's your boss?"
Amara nodded slowly. Her eyes drifted to the chair by the window, where a dress lay draped—abandoned, almost carelessly, as if someone had slipped out of it in a rush. Midnight blue. Satin. Thin straps twisted delicately, like vines caught in motion. It was elegant. Undeniably expensive. This wasn't her dress.She would've remembered owning something like that.
In that moment she felt it. A chill, threading up her spine like the touch of cold fingers. A flicker in her chest sharp, brief so electric.
And then his voice soft and low echoing like a secret spoken through walls, brushing the back of her mind.
Amara.
She shivered. Her breath caught.
Her hand flew to her heart, as though to still it.
As though the sound had reached inside her and pulled.
She didn't know his name but she remembered his eyes with a clarity that unsettled her. They were dark, burning not with any earthly fire, but with something older, something deeper. A flicker of ancient knowing lived in them, a weight of memory and meaning that her mind couldn't grasp but her heart recognized instantly. It was as if they had looked straight through time itself to find her, to remind her of a promise she had long forgotten.
He had looked at her in a way that unsettled her long after he was gone. Not like a man seeing someone for the first time, but like someone recognizing a ghost from a dream.
There had been no flicker of surprise in his eye. There was just stillness, a kind of quiet awe, like she was something he'd been searching for without knowing. His gaze had lingered, not with curiosity, but with familiarity, as though her face had been etched somewhere deep inside him, blurred by time but never forgotten.
In that moment, she hadn't felt like a stranger. She had felt remembered. And not in the way people remember names or places, but in the aching way we remember things we've loved and lost and thought we'd never find again.