I was going to go back inside, in a few minutes, and finish my shift, because there were other people in that department who needed the thing I know how to do.
And after the shift I was going to go home to a quiet apartment and sleep, and when I woke up I was going to begin the unfamiliar work of being a woman who takes her own life as seriously as she takes the life of a stranger on a gurney.
I had spent fifteen years learning to be the person who does not let the patient in front of her be thrown away.
It had taken me until this dawn to understand that I had been letting one patient get thrown away the whole time, quietly, at every dinner I skipped and every insult I absorbed, and that her name was Nerys Hartcastle, and that she was, at last, going to be saved too.
Both my duties done.
The one to him, finished at the bedside.
The one to myself, only beginning, out here, in the first light.
THE END.