The first time Jonah saw her, she was standing barefoot in the hallway of the hospital, her gown askew and her face turned toward the flickering fluorescent lights above. Her hands trembled. Her eyes were closed. And she was singing.
He wasn’t supposed to be there.
His shift had ended two hours earlier, but he had fallen asleep in the staff lounge, half a sandwich still in his hand, exhausted from the back-to-back emergencies. He didn’t even know what had woken him — maybe the strange hush that had settled over the floor, maybe the voice itself. It was soft, like smoke or snowfall, but unmistakable. A lullaby, maybe. Or something older.
He blinked hard and rubbed his eyes. The hallway outside the lounge was dim and empty — or so he thought. Then he turned left.
And saw her.
She couldn’t have been more than seventeen. Her wrists were thin and bruised. A paper bracelet dangled from her arm. She looked as if she’d wandered out of time — or into a dream.
“Miss?” he called gently, stepping closer.
She didn’t move. Just kept singing, the same line again and again, like a prayer.
He didn’t remember the words. But he remembered the way his heart slowed as he listened. As if something was being set right inside of him. Something he hadn’t known was broken.
When he finally reached her, she opened her eyes.
They were blue. Not like the sky, or the ocean, but like glass — something fragile, something that might shatter under truth.
“You’re not real,” she said.
Jonah froze. “I was just about to say the same.”
She smiled at that. A tired, knowing smile. “I know I’m dreaming. I always wake up before someone answers me.”
“You’re not dreaming,” he said, but the words felt heavy in his throat. “At least… I don’t think I am.”
She looked past him then, toward the exit doors. “They don’t let me go out there. They say I get confused. But I remember things.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I remember the fire.”
He paused. “What fire?”
But she just smiled again. “It’s okay. You don’t have to believe me. No one does.”
And then she turned, humming again, and walked slowly back down the hallway — her shadow trailing long and strange behind her.
Jonah stood there long after she disappeared. When he finally went to the nurses’ station to ask about her, they just looked at him blankly.
“No one like that on this floor,” they said. “Maybe you’re thinking of peds or psych?”
But he checked. He asked around. No one knew her. No one had seen her. No one else had heard the singing.
So he told himself he had been tired. Delirious. Half-dreaming.
Still, he thought about her for days. Her voice. Her eyes. The bruises.
Weeks passed.
Then one night, it happened again.
He was walking past the chapel after midnight, half on autopilot, when he heard her.
Same voice. Same song. Same fragile pitch.
This time she was sitting in the front pew, her feet swinging gently, her back to him.
“You came back,” he said.
She didn’t turn. “I never left.”
“Tell me your name,” he said, heart thudding.
“Grace.”
That stopped him cold.
“I’m Jonah.”
She nodded. “I know.”
“How?”
She turned then, and for the first time, he saw the tears in her eyes. “Because I prayed for you.”
His throat closed.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
She looked down at her hands. “Neither did I, at first. But I kept asking Him to send someone. I didn’t know who. Or when. But then you came.”
Jonah’s skin tingled. “You think I’m…?”
“No.” She smiled. “I think He is. And you just listened.”
She reached out then, and her hand brushed his.
It felt warm. Real. Solid.
But in that moment, the chapel lights flickered — and she vanished.
He gasped, stumbling backward.
Empty pew.
No music.
Just silence.
He checked the time. 12:17 a.m.
He walked the halls. Searched every room. Nothing.
Again, no one knew her. Again, no one believed him.
But this time, he didn’t try to explain it away.
Instead, he went back to the chapel every night.
Waiting.
Listening.
Praying.
And then, one night, she didn’t come.
Nor the night after.
Eventually, weeks passed. Then months.
But Jonah didn’t forget. He had started carrying a Bible in his pocket. One of the older nurses gave it to him, surprised at his interest.
“I thought you weren’t the praying type,” she had said.
“Neither did I,” he replied.
Inside the front cover, he wrote her name.
Grace.
And he read every night, hoping something would make sense of it all.
He found himself drawn to the psalms. Especially the ones about waiting. About watching in the night for the morning. About God being near to the brokenhearted.
One verse lingered in his mind: “Behold, I am with you always, even unto the end of the age.”
That was the strange part. He hadn’t read it in the Bible first. He had heard it.
From her.
Spoken softly, like a promise.
And though he hadn’t seen her since, he began to notice other things.
The way the light streamed through the ICU windows at dawn.
The way a dying man’s hand gripped his tighter when he whispered a prayer.
The way a mother clung to her newborn after they almost lost her on the table.
Each moment, somehow, felt threaded with something eternal.
Something unseen.
He kept telling himself it had been just a dream.
But dreams don’t leave fingerprints on your soul.
And he could still feel her hand.
Years later, long after he had moved hospitals and become head nurse in another city, he got a call.
A girl named Grace had come into the ER after a car accident. Young. Seventeen. No ID.
She had only said one thing before losing consciousness.
“Tell Jonah I remember.”
He dropped the phone.
Rushed across town.
But when he got there, she was already gone. No trace. No chart.
No record she had ever been there.
He sat in the chapel again that night. Older. Weathered.
And he wept.
But as he wept, something stirred in him.
A warmth. A whisper.
He is near.
He is with you.
And you are not forgotten.
Jonah smiled through his tears.
Maybe she had been an angel. Maybe a vision. Maybe something in between.
Or maybe — just maybe — Grace was more than a name.
Maybe it had all been real.
Or maybe…
Maybe it was just a dream.
But even so, he would never stop believing.
