Elara's POV
"Still nothing," I whispered to myself and not to anybody.
The word dissolved immediately into the dark the moment I said it. No echo. No response. Just the mechanical beeping of the heart monitor beside my bed, steady, counting out the seconds of a life that nobody seemed to want to witness ending.
2:47 AM.
I kept staring at my phone screen until it went dark again. No missed calls. No new messages. Not even a notification from one of those pointless apps that sends you something just to remind you it exists. I had an eleven percent battery. Even my phone was giving up on me slowly, draining away in the quiet like everything else had.
I set it face-down on the thin hospital blanket and looked at the ceiling instead.
The room smelled like antiseptic and something underneath it that I'd stopped trying to name after the second week. It was private. I'd paid for that much, scraped together the last of my savings account to avoid sharing a ward with strangers who had families that came and sat beside them and held their hands. I hadn't wanted to watch that. I still didn't.
No flowers on the windowsill. No cards on the bedside table. Just the monitor, the IV line snaking into my left arm, and the particular silence of a room where someone is in the process of being quietly forgotten.
"It's fine," I told myself. "Everything would be fine."
It wasn't fine.
I wasn't crying. I'd used up whatever tears I had somewhere around week three, when I finally understood that the phone wasn't going to ring, that nobody was coming, and that the grief I felt had nowhere to go except inward. What was left now was quieter than sadness. Heavier. The specific, devastating stillness of a woman who has accepted that she is completely alone.
I'm twenty-seven years old. That was all I got.
I closed my eyes and Caleb's face appeared immediately, the way it always did when I was too tired to keep the memories out.
Not the version of him I'd learned to dread.
The earlier version. Caleb was laughing in our kitchen on a Sunday morning, both hands wrapped around his coffee mug, looking at me across the counter like I was something special he was genuinely glad to have found. Like I mattered. Like I was the specific person he wanted to be standing in a kitchen with at nine in the morning when the light came through the window at that particular angle.
"You burned the toast again, Elara," he'd said, grinning.
"I didn't burn it. I caramelized it."
"That's not what caramelized means."
"It is now."
He'd laughed. God, he used to laugh so easily. I couldn't remember exactly when the laughing stopped. It happened gradually, the way most devastating things do so slowly you almost convince yourself you're imagining it. The cold shoulders. The phone screen tilted away when I walked into the room. The nights I cooked his favorite meals and sat at the table alone while they went cold.
Then the night I waited until two in the morning and he came home smelling like a perfume that wasn't mine and looked straight through me like I was furniture he'd stopped noticing.
"Where were you?" I'd asked.
"Work ran late."
"Caleb…"
"I said work ran late, Elara. Can we not do this tonight?"
I didn't do anything that night. I went to bed slightly. I stared at the ceiling. I told myself it wasn't what it looked like. I told myself that for another four months.
Then his ex-girlfriend came back. Mara.
Beautiful, uncomplicated Mara, who didn't ask difficult questions at two in the morning, who hadn't changed into someone he needed to manage. He didn't even tell me directly. He sent a text.
I can't do this anymore. She needs me. I'm sorry.
Three lines. No punctuation on the last sentence. Like the apology itself couldn't quite commit.
I read that text seventeen times in this hospital bed. Seventeen times, looking for something hidden between the words, some version of it that meant something different.
There was nothing there. Five years. And all it took to end them was three lines and a period he forgot to type.
"You're an idiot, Caleb," I said quietly to the dark ceiling. "You're a genuine idiot and I wasted so much time on you."
My voice cracked on the last word. There were no tears behind it, just the dry, hollow ache of something that had already finished breaking.
I slowly turned my head toward the window.
The city glittered below, indifferent and alive, full of people who were sleeping or arguing or falling in love or eating late dinners. None of them knew I was up here. None of them would notice when the monitor stopped beeping.
Victor's face swam up next from wherever I kept the memories I hated most.
My uncle. My father's younger brother. The man who stood beside me at the funeral with his hand on my shoulder said, "You're not alone, Elara. I promise you that. Whatever you need."
I had believed him. That was the part I still couldn't forgive myself for not signing, not desperation, but believing. I was twenty-four and sick and terrified and I had believed him the way a drowning person believes the hand reaching down is there to pull them up.
"It's a temporary arrangement," he'd said, sliding the document across his desk with that warm smile that lived in his eyes just convincingly enough. "Just until you find a husband and fulfill the inheritance clause.
The moment you're married, everything transfers back to you. You have my word, Elara. I'm family okay?"
His pen had trembled slightly as he passed it to me. I thought it was an emotion. I understood later that it was exciting.
The moment my signature dried, something in his face switched off. It was really fast, a fraction of a second but I saw it. The warmth didn't fade. It vanished, cleanly, the way you turn off a lamp. What was underneath was patient and cold and had clearly been waiting behind that smile for a very long time.
"Thank you, Elara," he said. "I'll take good care of everything."
He did. He took exceptional care of everything. Especially the part where he cut off my access to the company accounts, stopped returning my calls, and watched my medical bills stack up until there was nothing left.
I called his office every day for three weeks.
"Mr. Hart is unavailable."
"Mr. Hart is in a meeting."
"Mr. Hart will return your call at his earliest convenience, Ms. Hart."
He never did.
I went to his house even with my sick self.
His housekeeper answered the door and looked at me with such genuine pity that I almost couldn't finish the sentence.
"Please," I said. "Please, I just need five minutes. The surgery costs…"
"I'm so sorry, He's not home."
But his car was in the driveway.
I went to his office after that. That time he let me in. He sat behind his desk in his expensive chair and he listened to me explain the surgery costs and the timeline and what would happen without it, and when I finished talking he looked at his watch.
"Company funds can't be redirected for personal expenses," he said. "You should have considered your financial situation before signing, Elara."
"You promised…"
"I promised to manage the assets responsibly. That's what I'm doing."
"Victor, I'm dying…"
"I'm very sorry to hear that." He stood. "My assistant will see you out."
I had gotten on my knees. I, Elara Hart, daughter of Richard Hart who built an empire from a single office and a borrowed desk, had gotten on my knees on my uncle's office floor and begged for money to stay alive.
He'd looked at his watch again.
A sound pulled me back. The heart monitor changed pitch, a subtle shift that probably meant nothing and absolutely meant something. A nurse came in, moving quickly, hands already reaching for the equipment, saying something I couldn't quite track because my vision had started going soft at the edges.
"Ms. Hart. Ms. Hart, I need you to stay with me."
"I'm here," I said. Or I thought I said it. I wasn't sure the words came out.
The edges of the room went gauzy and slow, the way a photograph fades when it's been left in sunlight too long. The nurse's voice became background noise. The monitor's changing sound became background noise.
Everything was softening into something distant and almost peaceful, which I hadn't expected.
I thought about my father.
Not the grief of his death or the mess he'd left behind with that cruel inheritance clause.
Just him. Richard Hart at his desk on a Saturday morning, sleeves rolled up, reading glasses low on his nose, looking up when I walked in and smiling like my arrival was the best thing that had happened all day.
*Dad*, I thought. *Look what happened to everything you built. Look what happened to me.*
*I didn't even fight.*
The thought landed with a weight that had nothing to do with dying. It was the truest thing I'd thought in months.
I didn't fight. I cooked his meals and waited for his texts and signed the document and crawled to the office and I didn't fight, not once, not really, I just kept hoping someone would see me and choose me and…
*I should have…"
The monitor's beeping became a single flat note.
It was surprisingly quiet, the actual moment.
Less dramatic than I would have imagined.
Just the sound smoothing out into one long, even line, and the nurse's voice getting louder, and my father's face behind my closed eyes, and the thought I didn't get to finish.
Elara Hart died at 3:04 AM on a Tuesday with eleven percent battery left on her phone and no missed calls.
And then, everywhere completely went dark.
The flat line held for three seconds.
Then the monitor screen flickered. A glitch one sharp pulse of static across the display, like interference from something that had no business being there.
Then I gasped.
One sharp, violent inhale, the kind that comes from somewhere deeper than lungs, like a woman surfacing from the bottom of a very dark lake. My eyes flew open. My hands grabbed the surface beneath me.
It was not a hospital bed.
I stared at the ceiling above me white, yes, but wrong. Wrong light fixture. Wrong height.
Wrong smell entirely. No antiseptic. No cold sterile air.
I was sitting upright. In a chair. My hands were flat on a polished surface that reflected my own face back at me.
A mahogany table. Floor-to-ceiling windows. A city sprawling below in the full light of a day that had no business existing.
Voices around me. Papers shuffling.
Someone was laughing at the far end of the room.
I knew this room.
I knew this room.
My hands steady, unmarked, no IV bruising pressed flat against the table as the recognition crashed through me like cold water.
The boardroom of Hart Industries.
"No", I thought. *No, that's not…"
But it was. It absolutely was. And on the table in front of me, positioned exactly where I remembered it, was a document I had signed once already.
The document that had ended my life.