“We’ve done full imaging,” he replied coldly. “There is no foreign object detected. This is a complex internal obstruction.”
Leo shook his head, almost instinctively, like someone who had learned truth from survival, not from textbooks or machines.
“My grandfather choked once,” Leo said quietly, his voice lowering as memory replaced fear, “on a fish bone we couldn’t see.”
No one responded, but no one interrupted him either, because the boy’s tone carried something unfamiliar—conviction without arrogance.
“It didn’t show up,” Leo continued, stepping closer despite the tension building around him, “but he kept touching the same spot.”
The younger doctor glanced again at the baby, noticing now how the tiny fingers were curled near the same side of the neck.
A detail so small it had been dismissed as reflex.
Or ignored.
“Children don’t understand pain like we do,” Leo added, his voice softer now, as if speaking directly to the fragile body before him.
“They point to it.”
Isabelle’s crying slowed, not because she believed, but because something in the boy’s words felt dangerously close to hope.
Hope was cruel when it came too late.
Richard stepped forward, closer than he had been since the machines went silent, his breath uneven, his hands shaking.
“Check again,” he said, his voice cracking under the weight of everything he had already lost.
The chief physician hesitated, pride battling desperation, logic clashing with the unbearable silence of a dead monitor.
