The words "Dead On Arrival" hung in the air, thick and noxious, sucking the remaining oxygen from Ethan's lungs. He registered the paramedic's apology – "truly sorry for your loss" – as distant static, meaningless syllables that failed to penetrate the wall of roaring disbelief surrounding him. Loss. The word felt cheap, inadequate, like calling a crater a pothole. This wasn't loss; it was obliteration.
Police officers had arrived, their uniforms stark against the fading daylight and the flashing emergency lights. They moved with a practiced efficiency that felt obscene in its calmness. They cordoned off the intersection with yellow tape, interviewed shell-shocked witnesses jotting notes in small pads, and spoke in low tones amongst themselves, occasionally glancing towards the white sheet covering what used to be Clara.
Someone, a police officer with tired eyes and a gentle voice, tried asking Ethan questions. What had he seen? Could he describe the car? The driver? Ethan stared back blankly, his mind a maelstrom of flashing images – the dark sedan, the impossible speed, Clara's face turning, the impact – yet incapable of forming coherent sentences. He shook his head mutely, the effort sending waves of dizziness through him. The officer sighed softly, murmured something about getting a statement later, and left him leaning heavily against the cold brick wall of the bank, watched over by another officer who stood a few feet away in respectful, heavy silence.
Time lost all meaning. Minutes stretched into agonizing eternities, punctuated by the mundane procedures of tragedy. The arrival of the medical examiner's van. The careful, impersonal process of placing Clara's body onto a gurney, zipping it into a black bag. Ethan watched it all with a detached horror, feeling like an outside observer to the worst moment of his own life. He wanted to scream, to protest, to tear the bag open and prove they were all wrong, that she was just sleeping, but his limbs felt weighted with lead, his voice trapped somewhere deep in his chest.
When they wheeled the gurney towards the van, he instinctively took a step forward, a choked sound escaping him. The gentle officer reappeared beside him. "We need to transport her to the hospital morgue, sir. For identification and examination."
Identification. As if there could be any doubt. As if this anonymous horror could have happened to anyone else but his Clara. The thought was a fresh stab of agony. He nodded numbly, unable to speak.
The drive to the hospital – was it in a police car? He couldn't recall getting in – was a blur of streetlights smearing past the windows. The hospital itself was worse. Cold, sterile, smelling antiseptically of bleached sorrows. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting a sickly pallor on everything. He sat on a hard plastic chair in a small, windowless room designated for 'family consultations', the silence broken only by the distant, rhythmic beeping of unseen machines and the muffled sounds of hospital life filtering through the closed door.
A doctor, looking young and weary, came in to formally confirm what Ethan already knew, using clinical terms like 'massive cranial trauma' and 'instantaneous cessation of neurological function'. Then came the forms. So many forms. Permission for autopsy. Release of information. Details about next of kin. Each question felt like a tiny hammer blow against his already shattered psyche. Next of kin. That meant… he had to call her parents.
The realization hit him with the force of physical nausea. He swayed in the chair, bile rising in his throat. How? How could he possibly make that call? How could he utter the words that would irrevocably shatter their world just as his had been shattered?
He found himself clutching his phone, Clara's parents' number glowing accusingly on the screen. His thumb hovered over the call button, trembling violently. He took a deep, ragged breath, the sterile air burning his lungs. He pressed the button.
The ringing felt deafening in the small room. One ring. Two. Three. Then, Clara's mother answered, her voice warm, cheerful, laced with the familiar gentle cadence he'd come to cherish. "Ethan! Hi, honey! Is Clara with you? I was just thinking about you two…"
Ethan opened his mouth, but only a strangled gasp came out.
"Ethan? Are you there? Is everything alright?" Her cheerful tone faltered, replaced by a note of dawning concern.
"Mar… Martha…" he stammered, the name scraping his throat raw. "There… there's been an accident."
He stumbled through the explanation, the words clumsy, brutal, inadequate. He heard Martha's sharp intake of breath, the confusion quickly melting into horrified disbelief, then the raw, ragged scream of a mother's ultimate pain that echoed his own internal agony. He heard Clara's father come onto the line, his voice thick with shock, demanding details Ethan could barely provide through his own choking sobs. The call ended eventually, leaving Ethan shaking, drenched in cold sweat, the horrific sounds of their grief replaying endlessly in his mind, layering onto his own unbearable sorrow.
He made other calls. To his own parents, who reacted with stunned silence followed by frantic promises to get the first flight out in the morning. To his sister. To Clara's closest friend, sobbing uncontrollably into the phone. Each call ripped another layer of skin off his soul, leaving him raw, exposed, utterly broken.
Hours passed. He didn't know how many. Someone – a social worker? a police liaison? – arranged for a taxi to take him back to the apartment. The ride through the now-darkened city streets was another blur. He paid the driver mechanically, fumbled with his keys at the apartment door, the familiar sequence of locks feeling alien and wrong.
Pushing the door open, stepping inside… that was the hardest part yet. The apartment was silent. Utterly, crushingly silent. But it screamed Clara's presence from every corner. Her shoes kicked off haphazardly by the door. Her half-finished mug of tea from the previous night still on the coffee table. The throw blanket she loved draped over the arm of the sofa, still holding the faint impression of where she'd curled up. Her scent – that faint mix of vanilla and something uniquely her – lingered in the air.
Each object was a landmine of memory, detonating fresh waves of grief. He walked through the rooms like a ghost haunting his own life. Her side of the bed, undisturbed since morning. Her toothbrush in the holder next to his. The ridiculous cat mug sitting innocently by the sink where he'd left it that morning after breakfast. That morning. Just hours ago, she was here, humming, laughing, talking about graphite essence and Thai beach huts. It felt like a different lifetime, impossibly distant.
He ended up on the sofa, staring blankly at the opposite wall, the city lights casting shifting patterns through the window. He didn't turn on the lights. Didn't change his clothes. Didn't move. Time ceased to have any forward momentum; it just pooled around him, thick and stagnant with despair. Sleep was unthinkable. Eating was impossible. All that existed was the crushing weight of her absence, the endless replay of the sedan, the impact, the stillness on the asphalt.
Denial clawed at him intermittently. This had to be a dream. A profoundly vivid, terrifyingly detailed nightmare brought on by stress, lack of sleep, something mundane. Any moment now, he'd wake up with a gasp, heart pounding, and find Clara stirring beside him, murmuring sleepily about him hogging the blankets. He clung to that thought, focusing on it with desperate intensity, willing it to be true. He pinched his arm, hard, hoping the flare of pain would shatter the illusion. Nothing changed. The silence remained. The grief remained.
The clock on the cable box glowed red in the darkness: 11:48 PM. Almost midnight. The end of the worst day of his life. Tomorrow would dawn, bringing with it a future he couldn't fathom, a landscape utterly devoid of the light Clara had brought into it. He felt a weariness deeper than any physical exhaustion, a bone-deep fatigue of the soul. Maybe he should just close his eyes. Just for a minute. Let the darkness take him, even if just for a little while.
He slumped further into the sofa cushions, the rough texture of his work trousers abrasive against his skin. He closed his eyes, the backs of his eyelids instantly replaying the accident in searing detail. He squeezed them tighter, trying to banish the images, focusing instead on the rhythmic tick of the grandfather clock in the hallway, a sound that usually faded into background noise but now felt loud, intrusive, marking the relentless passage of seconds towards a future he didn't want.
11:59 PM. A strange sensation began, subtle at first. A feeling of… lightness. Dizziness. The air in the room seemed to thin, the silence intensifying, pressing in on his eardrums. The rhythmic ticking of the clock faltered, elongated, warped. He felt a disconcerting lurch in his stomach, like the moment a fast elevator suddenly stops. Was he fainting? The grief, the exhaustion, finally overwhelming his body?
The world behind his eyelids seemed to swim, darkness swirling, pulling him down. Not the gentle oblivion of sleep, but something more… forceful. A sensation of being pulled backwards, untethered, tumbling through a void. He tried to fight it, to cling to consciousness, to the solid reality of the sofa beneath him, but the force was overwhelming. The last coherent thought that flickered through his disintegrating awareness was an image of Clara's smiling face as she disappeared down the subway steps that morning.
Then, utter blackness. A silent, rushing absence of everything.
JOLT.
Ethan gasped awake, his body jerking upright on the sofa, heart slamming against his ribs like a trapped bird. Panic surged, cold and electric. He looked wildly around the darkened living room, disoriented, breath coming in ragged bursts. What was that? Had he fainted? Passed out from sheer exhaustion and grief?
But… the darkness was wrong. It wasn't the deep, oppressive black of the middle of the night. Faint grey light was beginning to filter through the edges of the curtains. And there was another sensation cutting through the lingering panic… a smell.
Rich, dark, slightly sweet. Coffee.
He frowned, deeply confused. Was he hallucinating? Were his traumatized senses manufacturing comforting stimuli? He pushed himself fully upright, his body strangely free of the stiff aches he should have felt after collapsing on the sofa all night. He felt… rested? No, that wasn't right. How could he feel rested after… after…?
The memory of the accident, the hospital, the phone calls, Clara… it slammed back into him, bringing a fresh wave of nauseating grief. Tears pricked his eyes again. But the smell of coffee persisted, real and insistent. And underneath it, barely audible… was that humming?
He stood up on shaky legs, his mind struggling to reconcile the lingering horror of the previous day with the impossible sensory input of this moment. He walked hesitantly towards the kitchen doorway, peering into the growing light.
Sunlight streamed through the kitchen window, glinting off the familiar surfaces. Dust motes danced in the golden beams. And standing by the counter, backlit, wearing his old university sweatshirt, hair in a messy bun, carefully pouring hot water over coffee grounds, was Clara. Humming slightly off-key.
Ethan stopped dead in the doorway, his heart leaping into his throat, cutting off his breath. His eyes locked onto her, taking in every impossible detail. She was here. Solid. Real. Humming. Making coffee.
"Clara?" he whispered, the name barely audible, thick with disbelief and a wild, surging hope that felt terrifyingly like delusion.
She turned, a bright, familiar smile instantly lighting up her face – the same smile he'd seen yesterday morning.
"Morning, sleepyhead," she said, her voice warm, exactly as he remembered, exactly as it always was. "Thought I'd get a head start. We've got that meeting with Thompson at ten, remember?"
Ethan stared at her, speechless. The horrific images from the previous day – the crosswalk, the blood, the white sheet – battled against the solid, living reality of Clara standing before him, holding a coffee kettle. It had to have been a nightmare. The grief, the trauma, must have concocted the most vivid, cruel hallucination imaginable. Relief washed over him, so potent it made his knees weak. Tears blurred his vision again, but this time, they were tears of profound, disbelieving joy. It wasn't real. None of it was real. She was here. She was safe. It was just another morning.
He took a shaky step forward, wanting to grab her, hold her, assure himself she was truly solid, truly alive. It was just a nightmare. It had to be.