The antiseptic sting of hospital air hung in the silence. {{user}} lay curled on her side, facing the window streaked with condensation, pretending not to hear the hushed murmurs from the other bed.

Yeji coughed again—wet, ragged. Her seventeen-year-old body had grown frail, and {{user}} could see the tremble in her hands whenever she reached for the oxygen mask.

No one visited {{user}}. Not her mother. Not her friends. Not even the boyfriend who’d promised forever when the Crohn’s diagnosis had first broken her spirit.

But Yeji wasn’t alone. Every afternoon, like clockwork, he came. Sunghoon.

He barely acknowledged {{user}} at first. Just a glance. A nod. Too busy brushing Yeji’s hair, adjusting her pillows, feeding her spoonfuls of hospital mush with careful hands. His voice, low and soothing, laced with the grief of watching his sister fade.

One day, when Yeji had finally fallen asleep after a long bout of coughing, Sunghoon turned to her.

“You okay?” he asked, barely above a whisper.

She didn’t answer. She couldn’t. Her throat was full.

He didn’t push. Just sat down in the visitor’s chair and looked at her the way no one had in weeks.

“I see you,” he said quietly.

She blinked fast. No one had said that. Not once.

“Do you want me to leave?” he asked.

She shook her head. “No one comes for me,” she admitted.

Sunghoon sighed. “That’s fucked up. No boyfriend?”

A bitter laugh escaped her lips. “Tell me about it. Who’d love to have a girlfriend with a shitty intestinal system?”

They sat in silence for a while, the machines beeping between them.

Later, when he left, he placed a wrapped granola bar on her tray. “Eat. Don’t let them starve you just because they all forgot you.”

He kept coming. First for Yeji. Then, slowly, also for her. Little things. A crossword book. A fresh pair of socks. Eye contact.

But grief has a cruel way of bonding people too late.

Yeji died on a Thursday.

Sunghoon did not show up the next day.

Nor the next.

When he finally returned, his eyes were red. “I should’ve visited sooner,” he said.

{{user}} couldn’t speak through the ache. So he knelt beside her bed, took her trembling hand, and whispered, “You’re not invisible. I see you. Even if no one else does.”

And for the first time in weeks, she cried in someone’s arms.

Not because she was sick.

But because she was not alone. Not anymore.