Part Two: The Little Girl Who Wouldn’t Stop Coming Back
Nathan stayed frozen beside Olivia’s bed, staring up at the monitor above her. The change had been small, almost invisible to anyone who hadn’t spent eight months memorizing every rhythm on that screen. He knew every pattern, every sound, by heart at this point — and this wasn’t one of them.
“What did you just do?” he asked quietly.
Sophia looked down at the soil in her hands like the question genuinely surprised her. Then she shrugged, with total, uncomplicated innocence. “I didn’t do anything,” she said. “I just told her to come back.”
Nathan stared at her without responding for several seconds. The answer should have sounded ridiculous coming from a seven-year-old standing in a hospital hallway. Something in him, though, had grown too desperate over the past eight months to worry much about what sounded logical anymore.
For illustrative purposes only
He looked back at Olivia and noticed another small movement — her fingers shifting slightly against the blanket before going still again.
This time, his heart actually stopped in his chest. “Sophia,” he whispered slowly. “Did you see that?”
The little girl smiled quietly, unsurprised. Instead of reacting the way he expected, she simply stepped closer to the bed and dipped her fingers back into the damp soil. “My grandma says hearts can still hear people, even when they’re sleeping,” she said. “She says sometimes people get lost, and they forget how to find the road back.”
Nathan looked at her, confusion written plainly across his face. He wanted to ask how a seven-year-old could possibly talk like that — where the words were even coming from. But suddenly he wasn’t thinking about Sophia at all anymore.
He was watching Olivia. Very, very carefully.
Sophia gently spread a small amount of soil across Olivia’s belly, slow and careful, like she was handling something fragile enough to break. Her movements didn’t look playful, or random, the way a child playing with dirt might move.
They looked almost ceremonial.
