Chapter 20: “Epilogue – The Quiet Kind”

Spring came early that year.

The cherry trees outside the hospice bloomed in blushing silence, their petals falling like a soft kind of snow. Eliot stood beneath one after his morning visit—hands in his coat pockets, eyes tilted to the sky.

He still woke up sometimes thinking about syringes.

About the line between help and harm.

But now, those thoughts came quieter. Like echoes instead of alarms.

---

Inside Room 5, an elderly woman named Rose lay curled beneath a handmade quilt. Eliot sat beside her, holding her hand as she told him about a garden she once grew with her daughter.

"She died before I did," Rose whispered. "Can you believe that?"

"I can," Eliot said gently.

She smiled without opening her eyes. "I don't want to be afraid when it happens."

"You're not alone," he said.

And she wasn't.

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That evening, Eliot walked home under a warm sky.

He passed a café that played soft music and an old bookstore that hadn't changed its display in three months. He bought tea. Sat outside. Wrote something down on the back of a receipt.

> The world doesn't need more angels. It needs more people willing to stay.

Until the end. Without fixing. Without fleeing.

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Years later, long after people had forgotten the title "Dr. Eliot Wren," some hospice workers still spoke of a quiet man who used to sit beside the dying.

He never gave advice.

Never judged.

Just listened.

And when someone asked what his job was, he'd always say the same thing with a soft smile:

"I'm here to keep them company."

---

The end.

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