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.
Chapter 8
Graham had been parked in the visitor lot since eleven.
He couldn’t have explained, exactly, why he’d driven to the hospital.There was no operational reason.No intel suggesting tonight would be different from any other Friday night shift.He’d been at the cottage on Lake Road, running the same dead ends on his laptop that he’d been running all week, and at some point, the distance between himself and the building where Maren was working had become a thing he could feel.Not a thought.A pull, steady and physical, like a current he’d stopped swimming against.
So he’d driven.Parked in the visitor lot, engine off, where he had a clear line of sight to the emergency entrance and the staff lot on the far side.He’d watched the shift change settle in at eleven.Watched the ambulance bay go quiet around one.Counted the security guard’s passes—every eighteen minutes, like clockwork, a pattern he’d already logged from his daytime surveillance.
At 3:32, the burner phone lit up.
Another one.Woman, mid-twenties.Sealed transfer.SPT-7 again.She’s in bay two.
Document everything.Don’t confront anyone.
She’s conscious.Talking to me.
