POV: Emilia Conti
The silence didn't feel like peace.
It felt like space left behind after something heavy had been moved—useful, necessary, but disorienting once it was gone.
No emails asking for clarification.
No invitations disguised as curiosity.
No pressure wearing courtesy.
Power had disengaged.
That was supposed to feel like victory.
Instead, it felt like exposure.
Without opposition, the framework existed on its own merits. No resistance to sharpen it. No enemy to define it against. Just a structure standing in open air, waiting to see who would approach—and why.
At the hospital, things were almost… normal.
Too normal.
Policies updated quietly. Oversight committees restructured. New language inserted where old loopholes had lived. People stopped whispering and went back to work.
That should have reassured me.
It didn't.
Because normalization had a cost.
A junior nurse stopped me after rounds. "Is it over?" she asked.
"What?" I replied.
