Her mind blanked entirely. She had no plan beyond squeezing her eyes shut and hoping — fiercely, uselessly — that the thing in front of her would simply disappear if she refused to look at it. She prayed every prayer she half-remembered from childhood temple visits, mixing Buddhist chants with whatever fragments her grandmother used to mutter, not particularly caring whether any of it made sense. She just needed the bloody doctor gone.
She kept her eyes shut so long her eyelids ached. When the door finally opened again, she still hesitated before looking. What if it was another doctor like that one? Another nurse with something wrong about her smile?
"Jia'er? Are you in pain? Talk to me." A warm hand settled over her head, and her mother's voice, thick with worry, finally pulled her eyes open. Her parents had returned.
"Mom." She pulled her mother into a tight hug and let herself cry properly for the first time since waking, burying her face against a familiar shoulder. Her mother held her through it, each sob landing like a small stone dropped straight onto her heart.
When the tears finally slowed, her parents asked, gently and repeatedly, why she'd been crying. She considered telling them about the doctor. She considered it for exactly as long as it took to imagine their faces. The worry, the immediate calls to a psychiatrist, the quiet conversations behind closed doors about whether their daughter's mind had survived throughout the coma.
She decided against it.
It was probably nothing anyway. A hallucination, a side effect of waking up from a year of unconsciousness with a body that hadn't fully caught up to being awake. That was the more reasonable explanation. The only reasonable explanation.
Three days passed, and Ding Jia did her best to bury the memory entirely beneath the steady, mind-numbing routine of recovery. Therapy sessions, blood tests, physical evaluations, all aimed at getting her back on her own two feet and out of this building she increasingly hated. The walls of her private room had started to feel less like luxury and more like a very expensive cage.
After enough complaining, the nurses finally relented and let her use a wheelchair to move around the floor unsupervised.
She'd just convinced her exhausted parents to go home and actually sleep in their own bed for once, a small miracle of persuasion that had taken nearly an hour, which left her blissfully, gloriously alone for the first time since waking. No one hovering. No one telling her to rest when she was already lying perfectly still. She was so done lying down.
She wheeled herself out of bed, dragging her IV stand along by sheer stubbornness, and made her way slowly to the nurses' station, where a smile and a few well-placed words bought her permission to visit the small garden behind the hospital.
It was a beautiful day, the kind that made staying indoors feel like a crime. Children in hospital gowns swung lazily on the playground equipment. A few patients sat on benches with their families. Birds argued over crumbs near the flowerbeds. Ding Jia breathed it all in, savoring an ordinary peace she'd taken for granted before her career swallowed every quiet afternoon she used to have.
She'd just closed her eyes to feel the sun on her face when a small, delighted voice cut through the calm.
"Big Sister, I just saw you on TV!!"