* * *
Maren waited until 3:15.
She’d watched the hallway from the station for twenty minutes, documenting the bay two traffic pattern.Janet had left the floor at 2:55.Peg had gone to the break room at 3:08.The woman in bay two was alone.
Maren picked up a blood pressure cuff and a clipboard.If anyone asked, she was covering Peg’s rounds during her break.Standard protocol.Nothing unusual.
She walked into bay two and pulled the curtain closed behind her.
The woman was awake.Her eyes tracked Maren from the doorway to the bedside—not the glassy, unfocused tracking of a sedated patient, but the sharp, deliberate attention of someone who assessed every person who entered a room.
“I’m Maren.I’m a nurse here.I’m going to take your blood pressure.”
Nothing.The woman didn’t move, didn’t speak, didn’t blink.
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.
