The room was too quiet.
Not the gentle kind that helps you sleep, but the kind that makes you aware of every breath you take. The heart monitor beside the bed gave a final sound, long and flat, and then stopped.
Sebastian didn't move.
Doctors spoke, someone touched his shoulder, someone said her name. None of it reached him. His eyes were fixed on Evelina, lying so still it felt wrong, as if the world had paused on a moment it wasn't meant to keep.
Her hair had fallen across her cheek. He had brushed it away so many times before that his fingers twitched with the memory of it. There was a faint crease between her brows, the one she got when she was thinking too hard, when she felt like she was forgetting something important.
Sebastian noticed it every time.
He should have been holding her hand. That thought kept circling in his mind, relentless. If he had come earlier. If he had taken a different road. If he had listened to the unease he'd felt all morning instead of ignoring it like he always did.
"I know," he said quietly, the word barely leaving his lips. He wasn't talking to anyone in the room. He was talking to whatever force had been watching him repeat this moment again and again. "I know how this goes."
Memories came without warning. Evelina laughing at nothing, leaning into him as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Evelina humming under her breath while reading, unaware she was doing it. Evelina looking at him with polite confusion and asking, softly, almost apologetically,
Have we met before?
His chest tightened.
In one life, he had told her everything. In another, he had kept his distance, convinced love was what doomed her. In another, he had tried to rewrite fate piece by piece, certain that effort alone could save her.
It never did.
The clock on the wall ticked steadily, each second heavy and deliberate. Sebastian stepped forward at last and took her hand. It was already cooling, slipping away from him the way she always did.
"I remember you," he whispered. "Even when you don't remember me."
Something inside him gave way. The familiar pain spread through his chest it was sharp and merciless, pulling at his soul like a tide he could never outrun. The air felt thinner. The room blurred at the edges.
As darkness closed in, one thought stayed with him, clear and unshaken.
If time was going to make him live this again, then this time, he would change the ending.