Chapter 2
FRANCESCA
The ER is already a shitshow when I arrive for my shift, which means today is going to be one of those days where I don't sit down until someone forces me to take a break.
I clock in, change into my scrubs—hospital policy, they don't leave the building—and stash my street clothes and bag in my locker before heading straight to the nurses' station.
The night shift nurse, Maria, looks like she's aged a decade in twelve hours.
Her hair is falling out of her ponytail, and there's blood spatter on her scrubs that she probably hasn't noticed.
"Thank God you're here," she says, shoving charts at me.
"Bed three is a pneumonia, needs IV antibiotics.
Bed seven is chest pain, waiting on troponin results.
Bed twelve is a laceration repair, discharge paperwork when the doctor signs off.
Bed five is our regular, back pain, we both know what he really wants. "
I scan the charts. "Anything else?"
"Yeah. It's a full moon." She grabs her bag and bolts.
I chuckle as I start to make my rounds—if you don't have a sense of humor, you'll never survive a big city ER.
The pneumonia patient is elderly and confused, pulling at his IV line.
The chest pain is a middle-aged investment banker who keeps checking his phone between complaints about the wait time.
The laceration repair is a drunk college kid who thinks his stitches are hilarious.
The frequent flyer in bed five is scrolling through his phone with one hand and hitting the call button with the other, demanding more pain medication even though his vitals are perfect and he walked in without limping.
By mid-morning, I've sent the chest pain to the cath lab with an elevated troponin, admitted the pneumonia upstairs, and discharged the drunk kid with wound care instructions he won't follow. I'm documenting in the system when I hear the ambulance bay doors slam open.
"GSW to the abdomen, entry lower right quadrant, no exit!" The paramedic's voice cuts through the noise. "BP's dropping fast, pulse climbing. Two large-bore IVs wide open, gave him fluids on the way in."
I'm already moving, snapping on gloves. The other nurses converge on the trauma bay, pulling equipment, prepping the room. Dr. Patel is scrubbing in, and I can see from his face that he already knows how this is going to end.
The kid on the gurney is maybe twenty-two.
His skin has that gray-pale color that means he's already bled out more than his body can handle.
His eyes are wide and terrified, darting around the room like he's looking for an exit.
There's blood everywhere—soaked through the gauze the paramedics applied, pooling under him on the gurney, dripping onto the floor in a steady rhythm that sounds too loud in my ears.
The smell hits me. Blood and shit and fear. The kid's bowel was perforated, which means sepsis, which means even if we stop the bleeding, he's probably already dying.
"What's your name?" I lean over him, blocking out the chaos so he can focus on my face.
"David." Blood bubbles at the corner of his mouth when he speaks. Lung involvement. Fuck.
"Okay, David. I'm Frankie. Stay with me." I take his hand because it's the only thing I can offer him right now. His grip is weak, his palm already cold and clammy.
Dr. Patel is barking orders. Type and cross for multiple units. Trauma panel. Page surgery stat. But I can see him looking at the monitor, watching David's pressure drop, and I know what he's thinking. This kid isn't going to make it to the OR.
I know this dance. The first time was years ago, the night after Vincent's funeral, when I showed up for my shift because staying home meant thinking about the fact that my brother was in the ground instead of annoying me with texts about whatever girl he was dating.
I threw myself into the work because it was the only thing that made the screaming in my head stop.
If I couldn't save Vincent, maybe I could save someone else's brother.
"Stay with me, David." I squeeze his hand, but his grip is loosening. His eyes are starting to go unfocused.
Dr. Patel cuts away the rest of the gauze, and I see the entry wound.
A small, neat hole just above his hip. But the bleeding isn't stopping, which means the bullet tore through something major—probably an artery.
His abdomen is distended, rigid. Internal bleeding, liters of it, filling his belly faster than we can replace it.
"Pressure's dropping," someone calls out.
"Push more units," Dr. Patel says, but his voice has that flat quality that means he knows it won't matter.
David's hand goes slack in mine.
"David, look at me." I lean closer, trying to keep him focused on my face, on my voice, on anything except the fact that he's dying. "Keep your eyes open."
But the light is already fading. I recognize the moment—that split second when the body just gives up.
When blood pressure drops too low for too long and the brain starts shutting down, pulling back from the extremities, trying desperately to keep the vital organs alive for just a few more heartbeats.
It never works.
Dr. Patel tries anyway. We all do—compressions that crack ribs, rounds of epinephrine, paddles that make David's body jerk like a puppet with cut strings. But his heart doesn't start again, and finally Dr. Patel steps back and looks at the clock.
"Time of death, nine forty-seven."
I strip off my gloves and throw them in the biohazard bin.
My arms are covered in David's blood, dried and flaking at the edges, still wet and red in the creases of my elbows.
I scrub them in the sink, watching the water run pink, then crimson, then pink again.
The blood swirls down the drain, and I scrub harder, trying to get it out of the lines in my skin.
I can still feel his hand going limp in mine.
Dr. Patel goes to tell David's mother. I hear her scream from several rooms away—that animal sound of grief that cuts straight through everything.
It's the same sound I imagine my mother made when the cops showed up at our door to tell her Vincent was dead—gang crossfire during a bodega robbery.
He'd stopped to buy a lottery ticket, and a bullet found him before he even knew to be scared.
I bag David's personal effects. A gold chain with a saint's medal that didn't protect him.
A cell phone with a cracked screen. Some cash and a receipt from a bodega on Amsterdam Avenue.
I seal it in a plastic bag and label it, and my hands don't shake because I've done this enough times for them to be steady.
By the time I make it to the break room, my head is pounding and my hands smell like gore no matter how many times I washed them.
The fluorescent lights are too bright. Someone left the TV on, a show with hosts who laugh too loud about nothing.
I pour myself coffee that tastes like burnt rubber and sit down before my legs give out.
"Rough shift?" Jen slides into the chair across from me.
"Twenty-two years old." I don't look up from my coffee.
"Shit." She's quiet for a moment, then leans forward. "Talk to me. What's going on with you?"
I almost laugh. "You mean besides watching a kid bleed out on my table?"
"I mean in general." Her voice drops. "You've been different lately. Jumpy. Checking exits. Looking over your shoulder like someone's about to grab you."
My stomach tightens. "I'm fine."
"Frankie." She gives me that look, the one that says she's not buying my bullshit. "I've worked with you long enough to know the difference between tired and scared. Which one is it?"
I want to lie. Want to tell her I'm just exhausted, just stressed, just imagining things. But Jen's been doing this long enough to spot a lie, and I'm too tired to sell one.
"I think someone's been following me."
Her expression doesn't change, but something sharpens in her eyes. "How long?"
"Few weeks. Maybe longer." I wrap my hands around my coffee cup. "It's probably nothing. Just a feeling."
"Feelings like that usually mean something." She leans back, studying me. "You see anyone? Same person, same vehicle?"
The dark SUV flashes through my mind—black or maybe dark blue, tinted windows, expensive-looking. I've seen it on my street multiple times recently, always parked in different spots. Different enough that it could be a coincidence. Close enough that my gut tells me it's not.
"Maybe," I say. "There's this SUV I keep seeing. But it could be nothing. This is New York."
"Or it could be something." Jen pulls out her phone. "You need to start documenting. Every time you see it, you note the time, the location, the plate number if you can get it. You feel watched, you write it down. Someone follows you, you call the cops."
"I don't want to be that person. The paranoid woman who calls the cops because she feels weird."
"Better paranoid than dead." Her voice is flat, matter-of-fact. "Trust your gut, Frankie. If something feels wrong, it probably is."
Jen leaves, and I'm alone with my coffee and the voice in my head that's been screaming at me for weeks that something is very, very wrong.
The rest of the shift blurs. A broken arm on a kid who fell off a skateboard—I make him laugh while we set it because fear makes the pain worse.
Another heart attack—this time on an elderly woman who grips my hand the whole way to the cath lab because she's alone and terrified and thinks she's dying.
A drunk driver with minor injuries who spends an hour screaming at everyone before security drags him out. An overdose who crashes and comes back and crashes again, and we pump her full of Narcan until she's vomiting on the floor and crying because we saved her when she didn't want to be saved.
This is my life. Blood and fear and the constant knowledge that I can't save everyone. That sometimes all I can do is hold someone's hand while they die and bag their personal effects before moving on to the next patient.
When my shift ends, I'm dead on my feet. My back aches. My feet are screaming. There's a pulled muscle in my shoulder from lifting patients, and I smell like antiseptic and blood and a full day of other people's emergencies.
I change back into my street clothes in the locker room, moving on autopilot.
My jeans, my sweater, my winter coat. The routine is so familiar I don't even think about it.
I shove my scrubs in the hospital laundry bin and grab my bag, and the whole time my mind is still back in the trauma bay, still feeling David's hand going limp in mine.
The winter dark has already settled over the city.
The cold hits my face when I step outside, sharp enough to sting.
I should take the bus, but the bus means waiting, and waiting means standing still, and standing still means thinking about David's hand going limp and his mother's screams and Vincent's face the last time I saw him alive.
So I walk.
The bodega on the corner is bright and warm and smells like coffee and cleaning products. I grab a protein bar and pay in cash. The bar tastes like cardboard, but I force it down because I haven't eaten since breakfast and my hands are starting to shake.
The streets are busy enough—people heading home from work, tourists wandering between restaurants. I keep my head down and my pace steady. Just another exhausted woman in a winter coat, invisible in the Manhattan night.
That's when I feel it... someone's watching me.
My shoulders tense, and the hair on the back of my neck stands up. It's the same feeling I get in the ER right before a patient crashes—that split-second awareness that something is about to go very wrong.
I risk a glance over my shoulder. I see nothing. Just other people on the street, none of them looking at me.
But the feeling doesn't go away.
I've felt it for weeks now. The awareness that I'm being watched.
The sense that someone is always just out of sight, tracking my movements.
The dark SUV that's always on my street no matter what time I come home.
I told myself I was being paranoid, that this was just the normal anxiety of living in a city where bad things happen to good people.
But my gut knows better.
I cut through the Village, taking the shortcut that saves me time. The streets are narrower here, quieter, with fewer people and more shadows. The buildings lean in close, and the sounds of the city feel muffled, like I've stepped into a pocket of silence where something bad is waiting to happen.
I hear footsteps behind me.
My heart kicks up, adrenaline flooding my system. I tell myself it's nothing, just another person walking home, but the footsteps match my pace too perfectly. When I speed up, they speed up. When I slow down, they slow down.
Someone is definitely following me.
My hand tightens on my bag strap, and I catalogue my options.
My keys between my fingers. A heavy flashlight in my purse.
My phone ready to dial 911. I took the hospital's self-defense class, learned where to strike if someone grabs me—SING: solar plexus, instep, nose, groin. Then scream fire and run like hell.
I'm on MacDougal Street now, almost to the intersection with West Third. Just a few more blocks and I'll be back on Ninth Avenue where there are lights and people and safety. I can see the intersection ahead, the wash of yellow from the streetlights, the shapes of pedestrians on the busier street.
The footsteps behind me get closer.
I glance back and see him. A man in a dark hoodie, hands in his pockets, walking too close behind me. He could be anyone. He could be nothing.
Except he's looking right at me, and he's closing the distance.
My breath catches. I face forward and walk faster, my heart hammering against my ribs. The intersection is right there. I just need to make it to the light, to the people, to safety.
The footsteps speed up behind me.
I'm almost running now, and I know it's stupid, know it makes me look like prey, but I can't stop the fear crawling up my throat. Vincent died when a bullet found him in a bodega before he even knew to run.
I know how fast everything can go wrong. How quickly a normal night can turn into the worst night of your life.
I'm almost to the intersection when the footsteps break into a run behind me.
I start to turn, my hand already reaching into my bag for my keys, when someone grabs my purse and yanks hard enough to spin me around.
A shout cuts through the dark. Then hands lock onto me, jerking me backward.