The moment rescuers lifted him from the shoreline, his body was already giving way. Blood soaked through the bandages wrapped hastily around his leg, the wound torn open by the Bull shark’s jaws leaving him pale, trembling, barely conscious. Yet even in that state—caught between awareness and darkness—he could only think of one thing. Not the pain. Not the sirens. Not the shock that rattled through every bone in his body.

It was her.

The woman who had been right beside him minutes earlier. The woman whose hand he had held as they walked into the water, laughing under the morning sun. Now she was nowhere in sight. And he, strapped onto a stretcher, could only fight through the blurring vision and crushing fear to ask the single question that consumed him.

“Where is she? Is she… okay?”

His voice cracked, barely a whisper, yet heavy enough to silence the rescue team around him. None of them answered. Not because they didn’t hear him—everyone did. But because in that moment, there was no answer he could bear.

The helicopter blades thundered overhead, sending sand swirling around the stretcher as paramedics worked frantically. They pressed gauze to his leg, inserted IV lines, monitored his slipping consciousness. But he kept turning his head, refusing to surrender to the exhaustion pulling him under. His hands shook as he tried to lift himself, desperate to see even a glimpse of her. Desperate for someone—anyone—to tell him she was safe.

But no one spoke.

Shock gripped his body, making every breath shallow. His skin turned cold, his chest rising and falling unevenly as he struggled to stay awake. Yet even then, when his body was failing, his mind stayed fixed on her. He tried again, the words trembling out of him:

“Where… is… she?”

For a brief moment, his eyes met those of a rescuer kneeling beside him. The look on the man’s face—tight, conflicted, filled with sympathy—was answer enough, even without words. His breathing stuttered, pain flashing across his face. He wasn’t asking the question anymore because he didn’t know the truth. He was asking because he was afraid to believe it.

A fragment of that moment was captured by a camera near the beach: his hand reaching weakly into the empty air, his face twisted not in pain, but in fear—the kind that comes from losing someone before your mind is ready to accept it. The video was only a few seconds long, shaky and blurred by the wind, but it held more heartbreak than any words could describe.

His body finally gave up. His eyelids fluttered. The world around him dimmed. As he collapsed back onto the stretcher, consciousness slipping away, the last thing he managed to say—breathless, broken—was her name.

He didn’t know she was already gone.

He didn’t know the rescue attempts had failed.

He didn’t know the woman he loved, the one he had tried to pull from the water with his own bloodied hands, had taken her last breath before help arrived.

When the helicopter lifted off the sand, carrying him toward the hospital, the stretcher felt unbearably empty—because the one person he was calling for would never be beside him again. And the words echoing in his mind as everything faded to black were the same ones that had left his lips moments earlier:

“Where is she?”

A question without an answer he was ready to hear.
A question that would haunt him long after he opened his eyes again.