Second Overtime | JENSOO & CHAELISA

Chapter LX

By late afternoon, the rain had stopped.

Inside the intensive care unit, time didn't move in hours. It moved in numbers on screens. Heart rate. Blood pressure. Oxygen saturation. Intracranial pressure. Every few minutes, a machine offered another set of figures, and everyone gathered around Jisoo's room had learned to read the nurses' faces before they learned what any of the numbers meant. A slight relaxation around the eyes meant stable. A pursed lip meant watchful. The absence of expression, the careful, practiced blankness that medical professionals wore like armor, meant wait and see.

No one went home.

They took turns sleeping in the plastic chairs that lined the corridor, their necks cramping at awkward angles, their dreams fractured by the intermittent beep of monitors and the squeak of rubber-soled shoes on linoleum. 

They brushed their teeth in the public washrooms with hospital-grade toothpaste that tasted like mint and regret. They washed their faces with paper towels rough enough to leave red marks on their skin. 

Seulgi made seventeen trips to the vending machines and returned each time with coffee so terrible it had become a running joke, she'd present it with the gravity of a sommelier offering a rare vintage, and whoever received it would take a sip, grimace, and thank her anyway. 

Moonbyul found a cafeteria somewhere in the labyrinth of the hospital's lower levels and returned with sandwiches and fruit and small cartons of milk, and she bullied everyone into eating at least half of what she'd brought. 

Jeongyeon disappeared for twenty minutes and came back with an armful of phone chargers, different brands, different lengths, and distributed them through the waiting room without a word.

Lisa refused to leave the corridor. She had claimed a chair directly across from the glass door of Jisoo's room, and she had not moved from it except to use the bathroom. She slept there in forty-three-minute increments, her head in Rosé's lap, one fist curled into the hem of Rosé's sweater like a child clutching a blanket. When she woke, she looked first toward the glass door to confirm Jisoo was still there, still breathing, still fighting. Only then would she ask what time it was or whether anyone had heard anything from the doctors.

Jennie remained in the chair beside Jisoo's bed until Nurse Park physically made her leave.

"You need to eat," the nurse said. She was a solid woman in her fifties with short gray hair and the kind of no-nonsense authority that came from decades of dealing with stubborn patients and their even more stubborn families.

"I'm not hungry."

"That wasn't a question." Nurse Park's voice was firm but not unkind. "You've been sitting in that chair for six hours. Your lips are cracked. You're dehydrated. And you're wearing hospital slippers two sizes too large."

"They gave me these at the front desk."

"They gave you those because you had no shoes on."

Jennie had no response to that. She looked down at the slippers, pale blue, paper-thin, the kind that made a soft shuffling sound against the floor, and remembered, suddenly and viscerally, the feel of Jisoo's blood drying on her bare feet.

"I'll eat in here," she said.

"No food in the ICU. You know the rules."

"I won't make a mess. I'll be careful."

"You nearly walked into a wall fifteen minutes ago. I watched you. You stood up to get water and forgot where the door was."

Jennie stared at her. Nurse Park did not blink. She had the particular, immovable patience of someone who had outlasted far more difficult people than a seventeen-year-old girl in borrowed slippers. Jisoo would have liked her, Jennie thought. The thought was enough to make her obey.