“I’m not Richard… but if you’re really scared, I’ll come.”

Michael Turner never imagined he would say those words at 2:07 in the morning, sitting on the frayed sofa of his tiny apartment in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, still wearing his steel-toed boots, his hands smeared with grease and grime from the day’s work.

The phone buzzed when the whole city lay buried in silence.

Michael was an industrial electrician and a single father to ten-year-old Emily.

His wife, Jennifer, had died of cancer four years earlier, leaving a hole in his life that never fully healed.

Ever since, he had forced himself to wake at any sudden noise—a child’s cry, a creaking floorboard, or a late-night call.

Tonight, however, Emily was staying over at a classmate’s house.

And the trembling voice on the other end belonged to a total stranger.

“Richard… please. I’m at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Room 608. Please, I don’t want to be alone.”

Michael frowned.

“Ma’am, you have the wrong number.”

There was a long, painful silence.

Then he heard a ragged gasp.

“Richard?”

“No. My name is Michael. Michael Turner.”

She began to apologize in a rush, her words tumbling over each other.

But her breathing was so shallow and frantic that a sharp knot tightened in Michael’s chest.

He knew that sound all too well.

It was the same terror he had felt sitting beside Jennifer during her final nights, in a cold, white room identical to the one this woman was in now.

“Listen to me,” he whispered. “I’m not Richard, but I can be there. Just hold on. I’m coming.”

Twenty minutes later, he was driving his old pickup truck down Lake Shore Drive, the dark waters of Lake Michigan glinting under a pale moon.

He kept questioning his own sanity.

A wrong number at two in the morning, and now he was racing toward a hospital for a complete stranger.

But as the skyline of downtown Chicago rushed past, all he could think about was Jennifer’s last night.

She had been so scared.

He had held her hand and promised she would never be alone.

That promise had been the only thing he could give.

When the automatic doors of Northwestern Memorial slid open and the sharp smell of antiseptic flooded his senses, he almost turned back.

He hadn’t stepped foot inside a hospital since Jennifer passed away.

The memories were still too raw.

But then he remembered the woman’s desperate plea: I don’t want to be alone.

He took the elevator to the sixth floor.

The corridor was eerily quiet, the fluorescent lights buzzing softly.

Room 608 was at the end of the hall.

The woman inside couldn’t have been much older than thirty-two.

She was ghostly pale, hooked up to multiple IV lines, with a soft silk scarf covering most of her hair.

Her eyes, when they met his, were filled with a strange mixture of disappointment and relief.

“You’re definitely not Richard,” she murmured.

“Told you I wasn’t,” Michael replied softly, managing a weak smile.

She let out a dry, humorless laugh.

“Then I am officially the most pathetic woman in Chicago. I’m Victoria Pierce.”

Michael froze for a second.

Pierce.

Pierce Aerospace & Defense Corporation.

One of the largest aerospace and defense technology firms in the country.

Victoria was the sole daughter of the late industrial titan Arthur Pierce.

“Richard was my boyfriend,” she said, staring up at the ceiling, her voice hollow. “We broke up a month ago. He walked out exactly two weeks after the doctors gave me the diagnosis.”

Michael didn’t know what to say.

He simply pulled the plastic visitor’s chair closer to her bed and sat down.

The silence stretched