Chapter 7 #2
Maren wrapped the cuff around the woman’s arm.
Her skin was cool, dry, dehydration that came from days, not hours.
As she inflated the cuff, she looked at the woman’s face.
Mid-twenties, like the paramedic had said.
Dark circles hollowed beneath her eyes. A scar, old and faded, ran along the edge of her jaw from her earlobe to her chin.
“138 over 92,” Maren said quietly. “High. But you know that.”
The woman’s eyes moved to the curtain. The same reflex. The same check for listeners.
“I had a patient in this unit five days ago,” Maren said. She removed the cuff slowly, giving herself time. “A girl. She told me someone was coming to get her. She was right. They came before morning.”
The woman’s hands clenched on the blanket.
“I couldn’t help her.” Maren folded the cuff and set it on the rolling table. “I’m trying to change that.”
Silence. The heart monitor beeped its slow, steady rhythm. Somewhere down the hall, a phone rang twice and stopped.
“Eileen,” the woman said.
Maren’s hands went still.
“The girl. Her name is Eileen.”
Five days of empty space—five days of Jane Doe, of phantom doctors and erased records and a bed stripped clean—and now, in the thin light of bay two at three in the morning, the girl had a name.
“Is she alive?”
“I don’t know.” The woman’s voice was low, accented, worn past fatigue into something deeper. “They move us. Different places, different cities. Sometimes the same hospital twice. I’ve been through four in three months.”
Four hospitals. Three months. Maren absorbed that. A rotation. A circuit. She filed the number away the same way she filed a patient’s heart rate—data first, reaction later.
“What’s your name?”
The woman’s mouth pressed into a thin line. She turned her face toward the far wall. “Names are dangerous. For you and for me.”
Maren didn’t push. She reached under the bed instead. The clear belongings bag was where Peg had said it would be. Inside was a set of clothes—a gray sweatshirt, dark pants, no shoes. She could feel something small and hard in the left pocket of the sweatshirt through the plastic.
She opened the bag. Her fingers found the object in the pocket: a thin metal bracelet, tarnished, with a small disc hanging from the clasp. She turned the disc toward the overhead light.
Initials. Two letters, scratched into the surface with something sharp. Not engraved—carved. By hand, by someone who didn’t have engraving tools but had time and a piece of wire and a reason to leave a mark.
E.R.
Eileen.
Maren turned the disc over. On the back, scratched in the same uneven hand, was a number. Four digits.
0917.
A birthday. A date. A code. She didn’t know yet. But it was something. It was a thread, thin and fragile, connecting this woman in bay two to the girl who had vanished from bay four, and Maren was not going to let go of it.
She memorized the initials and the number. She put the bracelet back in the pocket, sealed the bag, and slid it under the bed.
“I can’t get you out of here tonight,” Maren said. “But there are people who can. I need you to stay calm and let the process work.”
The woman turned her face back toward Maren. Not hope—nothing as clean as that. Older. More cautious. The face of a woman deciding whether to believe what she’d stopped believing a long time ago.
“They’ll come for me before morning,” she said. “They always do.”
“Maybe,” Maren said. “But tonight, I’m here. And I’m not going anywhere.”
She picked up the blood pressure cuff and walked out of bay two.
At the nurses’ station, she sat down and documented the vitals she’d taken—blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory rate—on a scrap of paper she folded and tucked into her scrub pocket beside the burner phone.
The official chart wouldn’t show her visit.
She hadn’t logged into the system. As far as the record was concerned, she had never been in that room.
She pulled out the burner phone under the edge of the counter and typed with one thumb.
The girl from bay four. Her name is Eileen. Initials E.R. on a bracelet the new patient was carrying. Number on the back: 0917. They know each other. This woman has been through four hospitals in three months.
The response took eight seconds.
That’s the first real name we’ve had. You just changed the shape of this.
She read the words twice. The tight coil that had been winding in her chest since Tuesday morning—since the empty bed, the erased records, the text from a number she didn’t recognize—loosened by a single turn.
A second message appeared.
Are you safe?
He asked that every time. Every text exchange, the same two words. She’d been annoyed by it at first. Somewhere between Tuesday and tonight, the annoyance had turned into something else.
I’m here. She’s here. We’re both still here.
Good. Stay on the floor. I’m watching the entrances.
He was outside. Right now, in the parking lot or on Hospital Road or somewhere in the dark perimeter of the building, Graham Holt was watching the doors of her hospital at three-thirty in the morning.
Maren put the phone away and looked down the hallway toward bay two.
The curtain was drawn. The monitor beeped.
The folded paper in her scrub pocket pressed against the burner phone—vitals on one side, a name on the other, both invisible to the system and both more real than anything in the official chart.
Eileen. 0917. If that was a birthday, September 17th, the girl might be seventeen years old.
Maren sat at the station and kept watch.