Matching quote and butterfly tattoos on feet

The ward has gone quiet the way it does around three, when the monitors settle into their own slow rhythm and even the trolley wheels seem to hush. I'm sat at the desk by the side room with a cup of tea gone cold and your last postcard propped against the phone, the one with the lighthouse on it. You wrote that the gulls outside the flat are louder than ever, and I laughed out loud, which earned me a look from Gwen on the next shift.

Something happened tonight I want to tell you about. Mr Ogilvie in bay four asked me to read him the postcard you sent before he drifted off, so I did, all of it, and when I got to the bit about the butterfly you drew in the margin he said his own sister used to draw them on the back of his school jotters. He didn't say much more after that. He just held my hand a while, and I thought of us at the bus stop outside Mum's, pressing our feet against the pavement to see whose toes curled first.

You asked in your last letter if the night shifts are wearing me down. They are, a bit. But I keep thinking of what we promised when you went north: though the miles lie between us, we are never far apart. It sounded daft when we had it inked on our feet at that little parlour on Princes Street, two butterflies and a silly little infinity ring each. Tonight it sounded like the truest thing I know.

Dawn's coming up grey over the car park. I'll post this on my way home, and you'll have it by Thursday. Write back soon, and tell me the lighthouse is still standing.

Love, Eilidh