Her question dissolved into a flurry of redirected concern — was she in pain, was she hungry, did she want the blinds opened. Ding Jia let her parents steer the conversation away from it. They had spent a year being afraid for her; she could give them an afternoon of pretending everything was fine.
Later that day, Lin Lin and Yu Xia arrived — her manager and her stylist, though after fifteen years of friendship the titles barely mattered anymore. Yu Xia threw herself across the bed and into Ding Jia's arms, sobbing loudly about the gray hairs she'd earned from a year of worrying. Lin Lin, by contrast, looked composed enough to be drafting a press release in her head and was, in fact, already three steps into planning the rollout for Ding Jia's "miraculous recovery" before she'd even finished asking how she felt. Only the unusual brightness in her eyes gave away how relieved she actually was.
The three of them had grown up two doors apart before college scattered them across three different cities, and fate(or stubbornness?) had pulled them back together once Ding Jia started clawing her way up from supporting roles. They had been each other's shield ever since.
"Just focus on getting better," Lin Lin said, pouring water into a glass with the efficiency of someone who'd done this in a hundred hospital rooms before. "I'll handle the reporters trying to sneak past security. The doctors said you'll need physical therapy. A year of lying down doesn't exactly keep a body in shape."
Beside the bed, Yu Xia peeled an apple in one long, unbroken spiral, somehow still managing eye contact the entire time. "Your fans have been camping on every platform waiting for an update. Heal first, then we'll talk about a comeback next time."
"Thank you. Both of you." Ding Jia meant it more than her casual tone let on. She'd put a lot of people through a long, frightening year — her parents, her friends, fans she'd never even met who had sent letters every single week she'd been gone. That little board of photos and letters across her room was the only space standing out among the white walls.
The two of them stayed two hours before slipping out, leaving Ding Jia alone with nothing but the steady drip of her IV and the hum of the room's air filtration system for company. The silence pressed in faster than she expected. She'd never minded being alone before. Now it made her skin prickle. Weirdly.
She was half-dozing in front of a switched-off television when the door slid open behind her. A doctor in a white coat and black-rimmed glasses stepped in — one of the three who'd checked on her that morning, though he hadn't said a word the entire time back then.
"How are you feeling?" he asked, already writing on his clipboard before she answered.
"Fine, so far."
"Good." He kept writing. And writing. Long enough that the silence between them started to feel less like professional thoroughness and more like something else entirely — though she couldn't have said what.
She busied herself smoothing a wrinkle out of her blanket instead of watching him work, and that was when her heart very nearly stopped.
A hand had appeared in front of her — slick, dripping, soaked entirely in red.
"Doctor, your hand—"
The words died in her throat the moment she lifted her eyes to his face. Every muscle in her body locked in place. Somewhere far beneath the frozen panic, a single thought screamed on repeat: run, run, run!
She blinked, certain her eyes were lying to her. They weren't. The clean white coat he'd worn walking in was now soaked through with blood, as if he'd just walked out of an operating room gone catastrophically wrong — except he hadn't gone anywhere. He had stood beside her bed the entire time.
As he leaned closer, the fabric beneath the ruined coat came into view: sliced open along one side, the wound beneath it dark and ragged. She forced her eyes away from it, back up to his face, only to find something far worse waiting there.
He was smiling at her. Not warmly. The way something hungry smiles at something it has already decided to eat.