4. Distractions
Distractions
LILY
The iced Frappuccino did little to help as I step through the employee entrance of St. Matthew’s Children’s Hospital.
The caffeine had long since started doing its job, but it did nothing to settle the restless energy beneath my skin.
No amount of coffee seemed capable of quieting the thoughts that had followed me in from the night before.
The automatic doors slid open, and I was greeted by the familiar scent of disinfectant, coffee, and clean linen, a combination that usually grounded me instantly.
Today it only reminded me of how far my mind had drifted from anything resembling normal.
The hospital ran on structure and repetition.
Medications at precise times, charts updated in careful rhythm.
Patients checked and rechecked until stability was restored.
Everything here had order. Everything here made sense.
I clung to that as I made my way toward the pediatric wing, trying to focus on the shift ahead instead of the fragments of memory that kept intruding where they didn’t belong.
It wasn’t working. Every reflective surface offered me something I didn’t want to see—city lights bleeding across glass, shadowed interiors of a private lounge, the steady weight of dark eyes watching me without hesitation.
I tighten my grip around my coffee cup as I pass the nurses’ station, earning a passing glance from an orderly I barely acknowledged before forcing myself forward.
Jenna was already at the desk when I arrived.
She looked up the moment I set my things down, her expression shifting into something far too knowing.
I barely had time to log in before she leaned back in her chair and said, far too casually, that it looked like someone had a good night.
The heat that rushed to my face betrayed me instantly, and I didn’t even need to look at her to know she was smiling.
I insisted I had no idea what she was talking about, but she only laughed and said she’d worked with me long enough to recognize the difference between my usual “happy” and whatever this was.
I tried to focus on the screen in front of me, but Jenna wasn’t done.
She reminded me almost reluctantly that she and Chris had both bailed the night before, her apology tumbling out in the same breath as an explanation about cancelled babysitters and last-minute emergencies.
I told her it was fine, and I meant it, but the conversation shifted too easily back to me, to my expression, to the fact that I apparently looked like someone who had experienced something worth remembering.
I denied it for as long as I could, but Jenna had known me too long to be fooled.
When one of the call lights finally flash on the board, I almost want to thank the universe out loud.
I excused myself quickly, escaping the conversation before it could dig any deeper, and let the rhythm of work take over.
The morning blurred into a steady sequence of patients and tasks, each one demanding attention in a way that made it easier not to think.
Children had a way of anchoring me to the present, whether I wanted them to or not.
There were medications to administer, temperatures to check, parents to reassure, and a particularly stubborn six-year-old who insisted his dinosaur plush needed a full medical examination before he would even consider taking his own medicine.
I complied with all seriousness, declared the toy healthy, and only then was the boy satisfied enough to cooperate.
By mid-morning I had almost managed to forget.
Almost. There were brief interruptions, glimpses of memory that surfaced uninvited and vanished just as quickly.
A reflection in a window that looked too much like glass stretching from floor to ceiling.
A voice in the hallway that almost matched another I couldn’t quite place.
Each time, I force myself back into the work in front of me.
A little girl wanted her doll’s hair braided before she would eat.
A teenage boy insisted he didn’t need help while quietly accepting every gesture of it anyway.
A tired father left his daughter’s bedside long enough to get something to eat and thanked me like I had done something far greater than I had.
It was in those moments that the world made sense again.
By the time lunch arrived, I had convinced myself I was fine.
I sat alone in the staff lounge with half a sandwich and a second coffee, staring out the window without really seeing anything.
The room hummed softly with the background noise of a hospital on pause, and my thoughts drifted despite my best efforts.
Not to specific memories, but to a presence.
To Katheryn. The way she had occupied space like it belonged to her, the way her voice had carried certainty without effort, the way she had looked at me as though I wasn’t something incidental in her night but something she had actually chosen to see.
I told myself it meant nothing, but the thought didn’t listen.
I found myself wondering where she was now, whether she was somewhere impossibly high above the city making decisions that shaped entire industries, whether she ever thought about anything or anyone without intention behind it.
And then, against my better judgment, whether she was thinking about me.
That question settled deeper than the rest and refused to move.
It was absurd. I knew it was absurd. A woman like that didn’t spend her time thinking about nurses who happened to sit across from her in a club. And yet the memory of her
attention refused to let go.
I sigh and reach for my coffee, forcing myself to look away from the window. That was when I saw the magazine.
It had been left carelessly on the table beside me,
half-hidden under a napkin, and I almost ignored it entirely. Then I saw the face on the cover and froze so completely
my hand stopped mid-movement. Katheryn stared back at
me, but not the version of her I had known in the dim glow
of a private lounge. This was something sharper, more
composed, more distant. She stood in front of a wall of
cameras in a tailored black suit, her expression unreadable, her posture effortless, like the world had arranged itself around her and she had never once needed to ask.
Powerful. Untouchable.
My stomach tightened as I set my coffee down slowly, suddenly aware of my own breathing.
I reached for the magazine before I could stop myself and began to read, each page pulling the world I knew further out from under me.
Hotels, Luxury developments. Investment firms. Restaurants.
Real estate stretching across the city. Her name appears repeatedly, attached to buildings I passed without thinking, places I had never associated with a person.
Katheryn Vale didn’t simply live in this city. She owned half of it.
A quiet disbelieving laugh escaped me before I could stop it, because of course she did.
Of course, the woman who had walked into my life like she belonged there had never been anything ordinary.
I turned another page, then another, each one reinforcing the same impossible truth.
This wasn’t just wealth. This was influence.
This was power on a scale that made everything else feel small.
On one page, she stood at the head of a conference table surrounded by executives who looked twice her age.
Every single person in the image was watching her.
Not speaking. Not interrupting. Just listening.
I stared at it longer than I should have, something uneasy and magnetic twisting inside me at the same time.
The woman in these photographs looked untouchable, cold, distant, nothing like the woman who had spoken my name, who called me little bird.
The contradiction didn’t make sense. It shouldn’t have been possible.
“What are you looking at?”
I jolted so sharply I nearly dropped the magazine. Jenna had appeared across from me without warning, her gaze already locked on what I was holding. It took her less than a second to recognize the cover and less than another to look back at me with widening eyes.
Then she smiled.
“Oh. Katheryn Vale? Billionaire Heiress. They say she is a viper in business... and with men or partners I guess.” She shrugs. “Whoever or whatever she decides to sink her fangs into never survives her.” She laughs.
My stomach dropped instantly.
“Lily? What’s wrong? You look like you’ve seen a ghost just now.”
I try to regain some semblance of composure but fail. Idon’t look up from her photo. “Guess she wasn’t kidding when she said she was a bad decision.
“Lily?”
“Don’t.”
“Fuck.”
I closed the magazine too quickly, but it was already too late. Jenna was staring at me like she had just solved something she’d been curious about for hours. Slowly, her expression shifted into disbelief.
“No,” she said. Then, after a pause, “No way”
I pressed my hand to my forehead. “Please stop talking.”
“You met Katheryn Vale?”
The way she said it made it sound like a headline, not a name.
I gave up entirely. I am begging you.
Jenna let out a sound somewhere between laughter and shock. Holy shit.
A blush crept across my skin, from my chest to my cheeks. Despite the cooled temperature hospitals always kept suddenly I felt entirely too hot. It only made her expression soften into something more knowing.
“Oh,” she said again, quieter this time. You did more than meet her.”
I didn’t answer. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I didn’t know what to say. She was the first woman I had ever been with. I didn’t even know I could be attracted to a woman like that. How would I explain it?
Jenna stood, collecting her things as if the conversation had already reached its conclusion. We’re talking about this later.
“We are absolutely not.”
“We absolutely are.”
She walked away before I could argue further, leaving me alone with the magazine still sitting on the table.
Katheryn’s face stared up at me from the cover, distant and composed, like she belonged to a world I had only brushed against by accident. And for the first time since meeting her, I wasn’t wondering what would happen if I saw her again.
I was wondering why a woman like that had ever looked at me at all.