—Part I: Dr. Elias Grant—
They told me not to go into her ICU room that night.
Something about protocol. Emotional distance. Professionalism.
But protocol didn't hold your hand when your world went still.
So I went anyway.
I stood by her bed, watching the rise and fall of machines breathe for her. Tubes disappeared beneath a hospital gown she would've hated—so stark, so colorless. Her hands were still, folded, one bruised from repeated IVs. A small, angry monitor beeped in the corner like a ticking bomb we all knew would go off.
Celeste Maren looked peaceful.
It was wrong.
...
I still remember the first time I saw her—not met her, just saw her.
I was a panicked intern sprinting through the hallway after misreading a patient's glucose levels. She was walking in the opposite direction, not hurried, not anxious, just—moving. Like she belonged there in a way no one else did.
Even then, people parted for her in the hall without realizing it.
Her presence was gravity.
It wasn't just her posture, her tone, her command of the floor—it was her intensity. She moved like someone always aware of borrowed time.
---
She didn't talk much about herself.
But sometimes—on late shifts, after we stitched up complications or wheeled another NICU case into surgery—she'd let the walls down. Just a little.
Like the time I caught her playing Chopin on an empty piano in the main lobby at 2 a.m.
"I didn't know you played," I said, pausing in the shadowed archway.
She didn't look at me. "I don't. I used to."
"Why'd you stop?"
"Medicine," she said simply. Then after a moment, quieter, "Music doesn't save lives."
I wanted to say it saved mine, right then. But I didn't.
Instead, I sat beside her on the bench.
We didn't talk for the next ten minutes.
She just played.
---
I'd wanted to tell her, so many times. Wanted to say, I see you. I want to be there for you. You're not alone.
But every time I got close, she was already gone. Moving on to the next case, next patient, next crisis. She didn't slow down. I think part of her was afraid that if she did, she'd never start again.
We used to joke about burnout.
She'd roll her eyes and say, "It's not burnout if you're already ash."
I laughed the first time.
I don't anymore.
---
I heard the Code Blue through the hospital speaker like a gunshot.
"Female, early thirties, cardiac event. ICU—"
I dropped my coffee. Ran.
She was already down when I got there. A tangle of nurses and machines and frantic shouts. Her chart was open on the monitor. Notes flagged in red. A flagged autoimmune marker I'd never seen before.
She looked so small. Like someone had folded her in on herself.
I reached for her hand and wasn't sure if I'd touched it or just wanted to.
And then they pushed me out of the room.
She never woke up again.
---
The funeral was three days later.
It rained. Of course it rained.
Thunder low in the distance, like something ancient grieving with us. The city was gray and dripping, and all the umbrellas in the world couldn't hide the fact that we were soaked in mourning.
No slideshow. No speeches from family. Just the hospital staff, her sister Celestia, a handful of people in quiet black suits. Her name etched into the program in sharp serif letters.
Dr. Celeste Maren
1989 – 2025
Obstetrician. Daughter. Sister. Warrior.
---
I stood at the back.
Couldn't go forward.
Celestia sat in the front, shoulders tight, hands trembling on her lap.
I couldn't look at the casket.
Not until the priest said her name.
And then I did.
It was dark, mahogany. Polished. Elegant.
Just like her.
And yet… so very wrong.
She should have outlived us all.
---
When the service ended, no one moved for a long time.
No one wanted to be the first to leave her.
I stepped outside as the rain thickened, cool needles against my skin.
And then—*
"Elias?"
I turned.
Celestia. Her face was pale. Her eyes too old for her age.
She stepped closer, voice raw. "She talked about you, sometimes. Said you had good hands. Trusted you more than most."
I didn't know what to say.
So I just asked, "Do you… think she knew? That I—?"
Celestia shook her head. "No. But maybe she didn't need to."
We stood there, drenched. Shivering. Quiet.
Two people who had loved her in silence.
Part 2: Celestia Maren's POV
The world didn't pause when Celeste died.
It just… kept going.
People kept walking, eating, scrolling. Nurses switched shifts. Babies were still born. The planet spun.
And I hated it.
---
The hospital called me at 3:42 a.m.
I already knew.
I'd been pacing the floor since midnight, hands numb from holding my own wrists. When the nurse said, "We did everything we could," I felt nothing. No tears. No shock. Just this empty kind of silence, like all the sound in the world had been sucked out.
They asked me if I wanted to see her.
Of course I did.
But I waited a day.
---
Celeste didn't like when people saw her vulnerable. Even as a kid.
When I broke my ankle at age seven, she carried me on her back down three flights of stairs, barefoot, in a thunderstorm. She never once told me she'd been sick that week, running a fever. She never mentioned how she'd collapsed the next day from pushing herself too hard.
She protected people from her pain.
That was the first and worst thing I ever learned from her.
---
I remember the time she taught me how to braid my hair. We were in the living room, she was barely fifteen, studying human anatomy while I sat on the floor in front of her. She divided my hair with steady fingers and said, "The secret is tension. Not too tight or it breaks. Not too loose or it falls apart."
It didn't hit me until I was older that she wasn't just talking about hair.
---
I visited her dorm once in college. It was midnight and I had a panic attack from a failed audition.
She let me in without saying a word. No questions. Just pulled me under her blanket, rubbed my back, and said, "You're okay. Just breathe. I'm here."
Celeste always showed up.
Even when she was barely hanging on herself.
---
The day before she collapsed, I left her a voicemail.
I said, "Come to dinner. I made lasagna. It's Mom's recipe."
She never replied.
Later, I found that message still unplayed.
---
The funeral was suffocating.
People offered platitudes. "She was so brilliant." "Such a loss." "Gone too soon."
I smiled. Nodded. Thanked them.
But inside, I wanted to scream.
Because none of them knew her like I did.
They didn't know she once had a phobia of frogs. That she loved lemon candy but hated the sour ones. That she read trashy romance novels on her nightstand between medical journals and always hid the covers.
They didn't know the version of her that I lost.
My sister. My guardian. My best friend.
---
When they brought the casket out, it felt final in a way I hadn't prepared for.
The rain hit the wood like soft percussion, like some gentle drummer echoing my heartbeat.
I walked up before they closed it. Just me. Alone.
She looked peaceful. Too peaceful.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out a small keychain. A silver charm in the shape of a star. One I'd made her when I was ten, and she clipped to her old bag all through med school.
I placed it in her hand. Closed her fingers around it.
"You promised we'd grow old, Celeste," I whispered.
"But you broke the rules again."
---
The priest's voice blurred in the background. The rain thickened. My dress clung to my knees.
Somewhere, I heard Elias trying not to cry.
I heard another voice too.
Part 3: Persephone' POV
It had been eight years since I last saw her.
And yet, standing under the gray sky, surrounded by soaked black coats and bowed heads, I knew exactly where she was.
Not in the casket.
Not under the soil.
She was in the music.
The silence between the raindrops. The hum of earth holding its breath. The distant, echoing notes of an unfinished sonata only I could hear.
---
Celeste had once played with hesitation.
A child's hands fumbling over ivory keys, too proud to admit she was nervous.
I'd sit beside her, guiding her fingers. "Feel the note before you play it," I'd say. "Let it speak."
She never got it right at first. But she never gave up.
That's what I loved about her.
Even when we stopped speaking.
Even after everything.
---
Our last conversation was a fight.
She was already drowning in exams and shift rotations. I told her she needed balance. That maybe music could still save something in her.
She snapped. Said I didn't understand. That I had chosen beauty while she chose purpose.
I remember the slam of the door.
The silence after.
I never called again.
Neither did she.
---
Celestia invited me to the funeral.
I almost didn't come.
But then I opened the piano in the conservatory for the first time in years, and there—tucked between the sheet music—was a page in Celeste's handwriting. A composition half-scribbled, half-sketched, titled simply: "For P."
I cried like a child.
Then I packed my umbrella.
---
She hated the rain.
"I feel like the sky's crying on us," she used to say with that crooked smile.
So when I saw the clouds rolling in that morning, I knew—she's here.
Watching. Listening.
Still stubborn enough to remind me of what I lost.
---
The funeral was already underway when I arrived.
Celestia looked straight at me across the crowd. Her eyes glistened with a hundred unspoken things.
Regret. Resentment. Relief.
But also something softer: thank you.
I stood in the back, like Elias did. I didn't deserve the front.
The casket gleamed with water and dark polish.
I thought about sneaking away. Thought about letting the past rot where we left it.
But when the service ended, I stepped forward.
Not to speak.
To play.
---
There was an old upright tucked in the corner of the chapel—dusty, out of tune.
But it was real.
I sat. Breathed. And placed my fingers on the keys.
I didn't play something grand.
I played the piece she never finished.
"For P."
She had written only 16 bars. I wrote the rest.
Each note a thread between us. A prayer. An apology.
And when I hit the final chord, I felt it: the air shift, the weight of grief settle somewhere just past my ribs, and the music wrap around the mourners like a second skin.
A woman sobbed in the second row.
Elias pressed his hand to his mouth.
Celestia closed her eyes, tears streaking down her cheeks.
And I…
…I bowed my head and whispered, "I'm sorry."
Someone I hadn't seen in years
Part 4: About Celeste
She was born in the rainy season.
A small thing with lungs too strong for her size and fingers already curled in stubborn fists. The doctors smiled. Said she'd be a fighter.
They were right.
---
Celeste Amara Maren grew in hospitals—not because she was sick, but because she belonged there.
She read anatomy textbooks before romance novels. Played piano in quiet corners between volunteer hours. Graduated top of her class. Interned at two hospitals. Rarely slept.
She stitched herself into the fabric of medicine.
Not because she wanted to be remembered.
But because she couldn't bear to watch others suffer.
---
She never dated.
Never settled.
Family dinners became rarer. Her sister waited. Her parents hoped. Her old friend stopped calling.
And still, she kept going.
Not because she didn't feel.
But because she felt too much.
---
In the end, it wasn't a crash or a fall that took her.
It was exhaustion. A silent, slow illness that grew roots in the dark, fed by sleepless nights and skipped meals. The kind of sickness that doesn't scream until it's too late.
When she died, the city didn't notice.
But the hospital did.
They lowered their voices that day. Nurses wore black pins on their lanyards. A young intern sat alone, staring at the locker she left behind. The on-call board remained unchanged for hours—as if no one could bring themselves to erase her name.
---
At the funeral, it rained.
A cold, deliberate downpour that soaked through umbrellas and coats and skin. No one spoke loudly. No one laughed.
Three people stood apart in different corners of grief.
A man who loved her in silence.
A sister who lost her mirror.
A friend who missed her years ago and never got her back.
And her parents—
They didn't cry during the service.
Her mother clutched a photo frame so tightly her knuckles turned white, a picture of Celeste in her scrubs, laughing at something just out of frame.
Her father stared at the ground, unmoving, like if he blinked, he'd forget the shape of her face.
They sat through the burial in silence.
Not stoic.
Just shattered.
The kind of grief that doesn't ask for comfort—because comfort can't fix what's already gone.
---
And then—
Silence.
Not the peaceful kind.
The kind that hurts.
The kind that presses in around your ribs like a memory you can't breathe through.
The world moved on.
But the people she touched?
Shut down.
Like lights going out one by one in a city at war with the dark.
And in that dark—
She lingered.
A heartbeat that never learned how to stop loving.
---
End of Chapter Four.