Sweet Romance12 min read
A Healer in the Valley — How I Saved Him, and Them
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I remember drowning once, but it was cleaner in that memory than the first time I woke up on a dirt floor with my ribs aching and someone calling my name like it was a bell.
"Are you awake?" a man's voice asked. It sounded like wind after thunder. I opened my eyes to bright, clear ones—eyes that belonged to a man who moved as if the world answered him.
"I'm Lila," I said before thinking. My mouth tasted of river and iron. "Lila Marchetti."
He smiled like he'd found a small treasure. "Oscar Zaytsev. Oscar—like a sunrise," he said. "You were out there."
"Out where?" I touched my head. There was no palace silk, no courtyard, only a basket of herbs by my feet. "My name is Lila. I live at the east foot of the mountain."
"You'll stay quiet then." Oscar hushed me with a hand that smelled faintly of gun oil and smoke. "Don't make a sound."
I understood why he said it. Men were moving through the grass like shadows, voices clipped, someone cursing under their breath. I learned later he had been hunting men who smuggled things. For now, my hands found a threadbare cloth and I chewed a piece of bitter leaf into a paste to help his wound.
"You know how to treat a wound?" Oscar's voice softened.
"I read," I said. "And I learned." My lips moved out words I had learned in another life—an imperial surgeon’s shorthand—and I felt the shame of lying and the comfort of competence together. I tore the corner of my dress, slapped the paste on the leaking cut near his thigh, and bound it.
"What school?" he asked, genuinely curious.
"High... second? I learn books at home," I stammered. It was a lie on top of a lie; I had walked out of court hospitals and back rooms once. Here I had to be a mountain girl. Here the sky was big and forgiving.
"Stay with me," he said. "I can't let you go."
I left him when the others moved on and when dusk turned the valley cool. I returned to my small house with a cage of herbs and a basket heavy with wild vegetables. That night I cooked and bound and counted coins—pennies for train tickets that would not exist in this life.
"You're reckless, kiddo." My father, Green Conner, laughed when I told him about the rabbit and the fight. He was a good man with rough hands and a softer voice than the weather. "Don't go into the deep woods alone."
"I won't," I said, and I knew it wouldn't be true.
At the county town I sold my small poultices at Hernando Ashford's drugshop. Hernando was all kindness and gruff edges—someone who kissed the coin then let the poor owe him. "Put it on my tab, Lila," he said, which made my heart a little warmer.
"About those textbooks," Louis Coffey said one afternoon as he stacked jars. Louis had a clean-shaven smile and the air of someone who watched too many dramas on small screens. "You need the high school books?"
"Yes." I dug out the list, my fingers smelling of chrysanthemum. "English, math, physics. I want to learn."
"Come by tonight," Louis said, and for reasons I would later understand, he blushed when I thanked him.
I met Oscar again in that town. He had walked into the shop on crutches, and I had nearly thrown a jar of dried root on the floor because my heart had tripped.
"Oscar." I called him Oscar like a test.
"Call me Oscar," he said, then cocked his head. "Or Morning, if you like. Morning works."
We learned each other's breaths. He taught me how to make the phone in my palm show a message to him; he downloaded an app and made my crooked handwriting into a contact with his name first.
"Don't call me Mister," he said the first time I wrote "Mr. Zaytsev" on my notebook. He tapped the pen like a promise. "Call me Oscar."
And I did. "Oscar," I mouthed to myself in the bookshop. "Oscar."
He taught me algebra by humming patterns, physics by arranging toy cars in formation, and the first time he held my head in both hands to clear a strand of hair, I felt like someone had opened a window inside of me that I never knew I could live in.
"You have to promise," he said once while we sat in a bright café with lazy pastries. "If anyone bothers you—anyone—call me. If I don't pick up, call James."
"Who's James?" I asked.
"My little brother-looking friend." He smiled. "James Delgado. He keeps me sane."
That was how the small loud world of soldiers became part of my life. James and Blake Bradley were the gang that laughed 'til they cried and pretended not to care when Oscar went tender around me.
"It came out of nowhere," Oscar admitted on a slow night. "You're not like anyone I know. You're calm with hands—like you are in two places at once."
"I am," I said. "I came from somewhere else."
He blinked, not in skepticism but in wonder. "Then stay here. Stay with me."
We stayed. He taught me how to keep a crutch upright, how to stand without pain, and how to hide when the world nosed in.
"Don't be reckless," his mother, Marjorie Busch, said when she met me for the first time in the hospital waiting room months later. Her laughter was quick and soft. "I like you, Lila. Keep him."
"Your mother is dangerous," Oscar whispered when I sat beside him. "She'll steal you like the sun steals the morning."
We laughed and he squeezed my hand like a secret.
When Oscar got worse, everything changed.
He was called back on a mission and later I got a single message: "Small Lila, I might be back late." I laughed. He came back the way men come back with paper and steel in their chests: a bullet had become part of him.
They rushed him into Sea City Hospital. Gary Petrov, the hospital director, moved like someone who owned time. Clancy Hartmann, an elder whose name people said like a blessing, was flown in from the capital. I stood against the glass and told the nurses everything I knew about the wound and the bullet. I told them about how tiny fragments could slide into places that would rip the heart; I gave them names of acupoints in a language that made surgeons narrow their eyes.
"She insists—she says she can guide it out," the surgeon said with a scowl. My voice sounded small in the conference room, but Clancy listened. "She says the Palace Needle—thirteen points."
"That's folklore," the lead surgeon, Emiliano Flowers, said. He was a man with steady hands and an ego like a chisel. He had scars of pride that had not healed. "We have protocol."
"Sometimes protocol kills the patient," I said. "If you let me take the lead for the first few minutes—I will draw the fragment away. You do the extraction."
Emiliano shrugged. "If this is a sideshow, we will not entertain it."
"Then don't," I said, and my voice was not a child's. "Watch me do it properly."
They argued in the corridor like lords arguing over a field. Oscar's parents—York Belov and Marjorie Busch—watched me, tired, like they had given the world all their currency and the world had spent it on worry.
"Just do it," York said finally.
The day of the operation, the theater smelled like cold metal and hot hands. Cameras were switched on in the observation gallery. People dragged their breaths into their chests.
I gave Oscar five small pills I had made—strengthening the breath, steadying the heart. "Take these," I said. "Keep one here." He swallowed like he had swallowed oceans.
I took my silver needles from a case that had stitched the whole world onto my palms. I counted the points and measured his pulse with the kind of fingers that had closed more mouths than I could count. I drew thirteen needles like a quiet forest. They trembled under my command like reeds in wind.
When I guided the fragment, the world tightened. "Now," I said to Emiliano, and his hands were faster than my heart. He saw the tiny sliver of metal move like a fish toward the net he held with clamps and skill.
They removed the bullet. The OR fell into a small, stunned hush and then applause bubbled up from the gallery, tentative at first and then whole.
I fainted the moment the object was out.
They carried me to the side. "You pushed it," Clancy said, awe and fear and pride lending him a soft voice. "I've never seen so much control."
That night the hospital cameras hummed like flies. Word spread. People came with broken legs and broken hearts and old wives with maladies. They came because I had carved one miracle in a place where miracles were supposed to be rationed.
And then a man with a steady face tried to take that miracle for himself.
"She needed us," Emiliano said one afternoon at a press meeting. "If she did display an effective method, it was a combination of surgical and acupuncture techniques we orchestrated."
He had meant to be careful in his words, but the press turned his hedging into a mural. The story soon roared into gutters and newspapers and the hospital seminar rooms. Emiliano began to claim a guiding role he had not earned. He spoke in an interview about "partnership" and "contributions" as if his scalpel had pushed the bullet out like a broom.
I watched him on the news with my heart like an animal on a leash. Oscar sat at my side, fingers tight with mine.
"Let them talk," he said. "Let them try."
They tried.
Emiliano outlined a plan to record the surgery as "a team effort" and to publish a paper in the capital’s top journal with his name first. People whispered about the prestige. Clancy and Gary did not interfere at first; in the hospital departments, tradition and ego and paychecks braided into a rope you could hang a career on.
But truth has a way of finding the light.
At the medical conference, they had an entire room booked to show "the combined technique." Emiliano walked onto the stage with a patient face and a PowerPoint.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he began, polished as a new coin. "Today we present a protocol combining modern extraction with traditional acupuncture. This will be my lead."
The hall hummed. Television crews had barcodes for every camera lens. I sat in the front row with Oscar, Clancy a tall presence behind me, and York and Marjorie seated like wary kings. The room was full: directors and interns, reporters with pens like small knives.
Emiliano fired up his slides. He spoke about protocol and precision. Near the middle, he showed a clip of the surgery—carefully edited, bright, with voiceover claiming "we placed needles and the bullet was guided." At the last second he had spliced a shot of himself standing by the table, his hand close to mine in frame. He grinned.
I rose.
"Excuse me," I said. The microphone felt heavier than any needle. "That's not how it happened."
He smiled instead of answering. "Aren't you the girl who fainted after the operation?"
"I did faint," I said. "But you were not the one directing those needles. The cameras in the theater were turned off at the moment I performed the guiding sequence because the OR manager was told to preserve anonymity. Someone edited footage to include you."
Murmurs spread like moths over a lamp. He laughed in that thin way people laugh when they're losing something.
"You cannot accuse a senior surgeon of fabrication," a committee member whispered from his seat like a warning wind.
"I can show records," I said. "I can show the uncut feed. I can show the time stamps from the OR cameras and the anesthetic logs. The needle placement sequence is mine. The pulses recorded during the extraction are labeled in my log with the timings of my manipulation. They match my notes."
A young technician wheeled in a tablet. "These are the unedited OR timestamps," he said, and the screen showed the raw feed. The audience froze as the video played: my hands moving, Clancy at the side nodding, the clamp cutting in only as I said, "Now." There was no shot of Emiliano's hands pushing the fragment.
Emiliano's face, under the bright lights, went through a sequence you could read like a hymn: surprise, fear, denial, flaring indignation.
"You cut my footage!" he hissed. "You doctored the video."
"No," Gary said quietly from the dais, standing then. "This is the uncut feed. We have the security logs authorized."
"Doctor Flowers," Clancy said, voice like gravel and authority. "Explain why you claimed leadership on the paper and dismissed the primary operator of the guiding technique."
The room leaned in. Emiliano opened his mouth and his voice scrambled for a stage he feared losing.
"I—" he started. He tried to be precise, and his aims crashed. He stuttered. "We worked—er—together. The team's contributions—"
"Who decided to make the paper without the main practitioner?" I asked. "Who omitted me from the leading author position?"
A silence like glass held in the room. The reporter in the first row began to whisper into her recorder: "Scandal at the conference." The man who had once been confident began to throw phrases like pebbles: "culture," "tradition," "seniority." Each stone bounced off the bedrock in the room.
"The authorship was a committee decision," Emiliano said in a trembling attempt to reframe himself. "I only represented surgical intervention."
"On what basis do you claim representation?" Clancy asked, and the elder's look was a needle.
Emiliano's breath shortened. The cameras turned to him like storms to a window. Audience faces split between the young who wanted truth and the old who wanted the castle wall of practice to remain.
Then, one by one, people stood. A junior attending raised her hand. "Doctor Flowers discouraging the primary operator is unethical," she said. "We have emails."
Another technician pulled up the OR logs publicly on screen. Time stamps showed who acted when, and the edits were obvious. The conference chairs decided to postpone the publication and initiated an inquiry.
"People are watching," a reporter hissed from the back. "This isn't private."
"Then let the records speak," I said. "If you are a scientist, let the data decide."
Emiliano's bravado cracked. The denial exploded into anger, then into a kind of pleading. He tried to appeal to the crowd's respect for authority.
"You aren't the only one who made this a success," he said, voice raw. "I have years of work—"
"Years don't excuse theft," a young doctor said, voice steady as stone. People started taking out their phones, recording every second. The mood shifted from curiosity to moral judgment. Around him, colleagues shifted away.
"Where's the team ethic if credit is taken?" Gary asked, and in that question there was no malice, only a professional hunger for fairness.
Emiliano's face went white. He stood alone onstage as a man whose scaffold had been sawed at the joints. For him the punishment was not a gavel but the public fall. He tried to speak, then stopped. The conference decided, on the spot, to suspend the paper and start an investigation. Emiliano would have to answer for the edits, the claims, and the false authorship.
The punishment was public not because I wanted revenge, but because medicine is a public covenant. Doctors serve in public trust; when that trust is broken, it must be mended in public. The audience was not a mob; they were witnesses. They watched as Emiliano's posture crumpled, a man who had lost his narrative and knew that the only place he had left was the quiet of humility.
"You must apologize, Doctor Flowers," Clancy said. "To Lila Marchetti, to the theater staff, to the department."
He did not kneel. He could not. He offered instead a flat apology, his voice hollow. Some in the room clapped—awkward, courtly. Some hissed. Colleagues spoke quietly of ethics seminars and of tightening authorship rules.
After the conference, people came to me. "Why did you pursue this publicly?" they asked.
"Because the work helps people," I said. "Because if we let claim and power replace truth, then the patient is the one who pays. I did not want Oscar's name attached to lies."
Oscar took my hand and kissed my knuckles. "You did right," he murmured. "You always do."
After the scandal, my life shifted into a new rhythm. The hospital offered me a registered position; Gary fought for my certificate, and the board, slow as ice and eventual as tide, began to make space. Clancy began to teach me by day and to scold me like an indulgent parent by night.
"Don't be a ghost," he told me once, watching me sleep in the on-call room. "You must learn to hold onto medical systems and to bend them quietly."
"Promise?" I asked.
"Promise," he said, and I felt a chain of human kindness wrap my name.
Oscar recovered and left the hospital slowly, like someone emerging from a long dark tunnel. He took a week of rest and then two months of quiet. We moved into a small house that smelled like boiled ginger and old paper. His parents stayed in the city, his sister Anna Xiao amused by the way I hummed while I cooked.
We were engaged after three hurried weeks of talks; the elders insisted and everyone agreed it was good. It felt like a pact done in laughter.
"Are you sure," my mother, Stefanie Sandberg, said when she flew in to see us, "you don't want to wait until you graduate?"
"Stefanie," I said, and laughed because everything sounded drama when parent and child spoke of futures. "I'm doing this our way."
Oscar's grandparents came and they wanted to test me with small chores as if happiness were a recipe with many complicated steps. The recognition of families became a collage of kind tests and gentle jokes.
Life's small miracles returned again and again. I delivered a baby whose hand had been tangled around its neck two weeks early. "The mother refused cesarean," a nurse said, voice rough. "She wanted a natural birth."
"Then we'll work with her," I said. I found the acupoint and the rhythm and made the room hold its breath. The baby unfurled like a sunbeam and cried fiercely.
"That's one for the books," Gary said with a smile. "I can't believe we are saying this, but your hands saved a life."
"That's our job," I told him softly.
People started to leave me gifts I never expected: notes, small jars with herbs from far fields, and letters from those who had traveled from villages because of what they had read or been told. I kept them in a small chest Oscar's mother had given me. I learned how to balance pride and humility, how to say no when my energy was low, and how to teach with a steady hand.
Months after the conference, I stood in a small room where surgeons and old doctors gathered for a lecture I had been asked to give. Emiliano did not come. The room was full of eyes that watched like gentle judges. I spoke about balance—about the ethics of authorship, the realness of practice, the hands that do the work.
Afterward a young doctor asked me, "How did you push the fragment?"
I smiled. "With patience and certainty. You must be a river, not a hammer."
Oscar sat in the back and clapped, a smile like a lighthouse. James and Blake came with him, teasing and earnest.
"Do you regret the way you left your old life?" Oscar asked one night as we sat on the small balcony, watching city lights. The air was warm and accidental.
"Sometimes I dream of silk and courts," I said. "But this is my life now. I have you. I have patients. I have a chance to learn the modern and bring the old crafts into a place where people can be saved."
He kissed my forehead. "Promise me something," he said, and I thought he would ask a vow—
"I promise," I said as he leaned in.
He smiled. "That when you deliver babies, patch hearts, and steal glances at me over a patient's bed, you'll always remember that the world is not only a battlefield. It's a place to be kind."
"I remember," I said.
Years later, when people asked me how it felt to be a girl from a mountain who learned to pull a bullet out of a man’s chest and then to become a doctor in a hospital, I would tell them simply:
"I was taught to be steady. I learned to hold a needle, and one day the needle led me to a life I would not have chosen, but that I would not trade."
The End
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