She comes in forty seconds later. Mid-forties. Beigescrubs. Ponytail that's seen better days. Flat affect — the face of someone who's done this long enough to stop being surprised by anything a patient might say or do. Her lanyard has a cartoon cat wearing a stethoscope and smiling, which feels like a personal insult given the circumstances.
"You're awake." Not a question. An observation, delivered like she's reading a script she wrote and has since grown tired of.
"My phone." Rougher than I want it. Dry throat, the rasp of a man who hasn't used his voice in however many hours I've been here — a number I don't have and she hasn't offered.
She checks the clipboard at the foot of the bed. Flips a page. Doesn't hurry.
"Personal effects on arrival: wallet, keys, one boot." She looks up. "No phone."
"Check again."
"I already did." The flatness doesn't move. "It wasn't with you when the paramedics brought you in."
"Who was at the scene before the ambulance?"
She shrugs. One shoulder. Minimal effort. "I work the floor, Mr. Hollander. I wasn't there."
It lands all at once. A solid weight dropping through my chest into my stomach, something swallowed whole.
Somebody was at the wreck before the sirens. Calloway's people — the cruiser, the unmarked sedan, both. They pulled the phone. Twelve frames of Hannah Brooks. Twelve frames of Voss's hand on her arm. Twelve frames of the lakehouse and the handshake and the whole operation laid out in grainy proof. Gone. Wiped before itcould reach Cole, before it could reach Wiseman, before it could do the one thing it existed to do — and it never left the phone, never went anywhere, so when the phone went, all of it went with it.
I swing my legs over the side. The gown rides up. My skin hits cold vinyl. The IV pulls taut. My fingers find the tape, peel — one sharp motion, because slow hurts worse — and the catheter slides out of the back of my hand trailing a single drop of blood that hits the floor between my bare feet.
I stand. The room tilts harder. I brace on the rail and wait for the tilt to become a slide and the slide to become a fall. It doesn't. My legs hold. They've held worse. The Marines taught my body things about staying upright that this hospital doesn't get a vote on.
"You absolutely cannot do that." Her voice finally has something in it — not concern, something adjacent to professional alarm. She takes half a step, hand out like she might restrain me, then thinks better of it. Smart.
"Get me Dr. Parsons." Steady now. The kind that comes from below conscious control, the place where fear gets handled before it reaches the surface. "Now."
She looks at me one long beat. The cartoon cat grins up at both of us, stethoscope and all, unbothered by the fact that everything we've worked for just went up in smoke and I'm standing here in a gown with one bare foot on the linoleum and blood drying on my hand.
She turns and walks out. Doesn't run. The door swings shut behind her with a softness that feels deliberate, like the building's trying not to draw attention to what's happening inside it.
I stand there. Breathing. The ribs grind on every inhale. The bandage throbs in time with my pulse. The cuff hangs loose on my arm like something I forgot to take off.
The phone is gone. Hannah's in that house. Cole's waiting for a text that isn't coming.
I need my clothes.
Dr. Parsons' office is the kind of room that makes you wonder if the hospital budget covers interior design or if someone gave up halfway through and decided clutter was a style. Charts in leaning towers that defy gravity and sense. A potted plant on the sill doing a slow-motion surrender to mortality. The framed diploma hangs crooked, the kind of crooked that's been there long enough to be a feature, because straightening it would mean admitting it's there.
I stand in the doorway. Gown. A strip of tape still hanging off the back of my left hand. One bare foot, one sock — the sock appeared between the room and here, courtesy of an aide who took one look at me shuffling down the hall and decided dignity, however minimal, was worth saving. The gown's open at the back. I can feel the draft.
Dr. Lena Parsons comes in already holding my chart. Early forties. Sharp behind wire-rims. Dark hair knotted up like it was done under duress and held by force of will. She moves like someone used to being the most competent person in any room and tired of it.
She doesn't sit. Neither do I. We stand on oppositesides of the desk like it's a negotiation and the desk is the line between us.
"Mild concussion." Flat, finger on the chart. "Two cracked ribs, left side, posterior. Laceration along the left temple, fourteen stitches, non-penetrating. Blood pressure's still unstable from the sedation — 145 over 90. Not catastrophic, not ideal." She looks up. "You are not medically cleared to leave, Mr. Hollander."
"I'm leaving regardless." Steady. The room's stopped tilting, or I've stopped noticing, which is functionally the same. "The only question is whether you sign the AMA paperwork or I walk out without it."
"That's not how this works." No heat. Just fact, from someone who's had this conversation and knows how it ends.
"I did two tours." Even. The kind of even that comes from reciting your medical history to people in uniform while blood dried on your shirt. "I've been shot — round through the left shoulder, took out a chunk of the deltoid, six months of rehab. I know exactly what my body can and can't handle." I hold her eyes. "Right now it can handle walking."
She holds the gaze. Doesn't flinch. Her eyes do something clinical — pupil check, reading neurological function without admitting it. She's clocking my speech: clear, linear, no slur, no trailing off. Watching my stance: weight even, no list, no favoring a side. Running the math on a man who says he can walk and looks like he means it, and the math is coming out in my favor despite every line on that chart.
"Someone to drive you?"
