At three in the morning the surgical ward had the particular hush of a place where everyone is pretending to be asleep. Amara, the night nurse, moved through it in soft shoes, checking charts and drips, until she noticed a lamp still burning in room twelve. Mr. Costa, a retired fisherman, lay with his eyes wide open, studying the ceiling as if it might offer him an alternative to the morning. "I can't sleep," he admitted. "They operate tomorrow, and I can't stop thinking about it."
She could have offered him a sleeping tablet; it would have been the efficient thing to do. Instead, she drew a chair up to the bed and sat down. "Tell me about the sea," she said. Something in his face loosened. He began to describe dawn on open water, the smell of salt and wet nets, the old boat he had named Maria after his wife. Amara dimmed the lamp and listened, and while he talked she took his pulse and, in a low voice, described the sound of waves against a hull, as one might describe a lullaby.
Halfway through a sentence he was asleep. By the time the day shift arrived at seven, Amara was so tired that her feet had gone beyond complaining. On Mr. Costa's tray she found a note in careful, shaky handwriting: "Thank you for the sea."