Conduction

The rain had been falling for three days when Elena received the text from Marcus. 'She's asking for you. Room 402.'

She drove through the curtain of water on the windshield, wipers fighting a losing battle against the downpour. Five years of silence between them, and now this. Some things you don't get to choose.

Marcus was waiting outside the hospital room, his gray hair darker than she remembered from the rain. He looked like her oldest friend, the one who'd held her hair back when she was nineteen and puking cherry vodka in his bathtub. He also looked like the stranger who'd disappeared without a word after the funeral.

'You came,' he said.

'You asked.'

Inside, Sarah was asleep. Tubes and lines everywhere, one dripping clear fluid into her vein—water keeping her alive another hour, another day. Elena had never understood how much of medicine was just water management until now.

'She's not in pain,' Marcus said quietly. 'The morphine sees to that.'

'Why did you leave?' The question came out before she could stop it. Five years of swallowing it down, and now it just spilled out like vomit.

Marcus looked at the window where lightning fractured the sky, illuminating his weathered face in harsh flash-photography white. 'Because I loved you both too much. Because I watched you destroy each other, and I couldn't—' He broke off. 'I'm your friend, Elena. I'm also her friend. There wasn't room for both.'

'So you chose neither.'

'I chose survival.'

Thunder rattled the glass, and in the reflection, Elena saw Sarah's eyes open. Just for a moment. Just long enough.

'She knows,' Marcus said.

The lightning struck again, closer this time, and the power flickered. In that split second of darkness, Elena reached for Marcus's hand and found it already reaching for hers. Some conduits never really break—they just wait for enough voltage to jump the gap again.