"You're my girlfriend of ten years," Jiang Ninghao said, gripping my hand like he could prove a fact with his fingers.
"Mr. Jiang, please sit still," the nurse said, pushing a wheelchair. "We need to check his vitals."
"Ke-ke," he said, eyes fixed on me. "Don't leave me."
"Sir, who is she?" another nurse asked as they guided him inside the ER drop-off. The night staff whooped and sighed in that tired, funny way hospitals do when drama lands between the trauma bays.
"She's my—" Jiang Ninghao looked at me the way a man reads a page he believes he has read before. He smiled like memory had returned and pointed at me. "My girlfriend of ten years."
I opened my mouth and closed it the same second. The wheelchair stopped. People turned. A pushing nurse's eyebrows rose. An orderly glanced at his phone. A resident on a break froze mid-chew.
"Lu Ke?" someone asked, because my name was close enough to call out and hospitals are loud with identities.
"That's her," Jiang said. He squeezed my fingers until I felt the pressure in my arm. "Ke-ke, stay with me. Don't leave."
Three doctors and a nurse clustered, asking about head trauma and loss of consciousness, scanning his chart with swift, clinical motions. No one asked if the girlfriend claim was real. No one asked whether I knew him. They treated the claim as another vital sign.
"This way," a
