“Be careful with Maria,” he said.“If she starts connecting the supply numbers to the transfers?—”
“She won’t.Not from me.I’m the new day-shift nurse who’s interested in helping her solve an inventory puzzle.That’s all she sees.”
His hand was still on the lanyard.He let it drop.
“Go deliver your flowers,” she said.
“I’m out of flowers.”
“Then go restock.I have patients.”She picked up her phone and moved past him toward the door.Her shoulder brushed his arm.She didn’t apologize for the contact, and he didn’t pretend he hadn’t felt it.
The stairwell door closed behind her, and the hum of the hospital rushed back in—the overhead pages, the distant beeping, the rolling wheels and muted voices of a building full of people who had no idea what was running underneath their routines.
Graham stood in the stairwell for ten seconds.Then he went back to work.
Chapter 13
The supply closet on the second floor of the med-surg wing held one hundred and twelve boxes, and Maren had counted every one of them twice before her shift started.
She stood with a clipboard in one hand and a pen in the other, pretending to check linens.The inventory tag on the back of the door had been updated last Friday by someone on the night crew.Baseline count for standard eighteen-gauge IV kits: forty-two per pull cart, two carts per floor.Eighty-four total.
She'd pulled the actual count ten minutes ago.Sixty-one.
Twenty-three kits short.
The day shift hadn't started using them yet.The morning handoff nurse had signed the supply log at six-fifteen and confirmed full carts.Which meant the shortage had happened overnight, between her signature and Maren's count at six-fifty-two.
Maren photographed the empty slots on the cart with the burner phone Harper had given her Sunday night.She photographed the log sheet with the Friday baseline.She photographed the time-stamped morning handoff signature.Three pictures in under thirty seconds, her hands moving the way they moved when she was starting an IV on a patient who'd told her she hated needles.
Calm.Careful.Precise.
She slid the phone back into the hip pocket of her scrub pants and walked out of the closet as if she'd found nothing more interesting than a shortage of washcloths.
The hall clock read six-fifty-six.
Four minutes to the top of the hour.Four minutes to her first patient assignment.She walked past the nurses' station, past the charge nurse reading through the overnight report, past the orderlies wheeling breakfast trays onto the floor, and pushed through the door to the east stairwell.
He'd told her ten after seven.She was early.
* * *
She took the stairs two at a time to the landing between the second and third floors and sat down on the top step.
The east stairwell was the least-used in the building.No windows, no traffic, no reason for anyone to be in it unless they were avoiding the elevators or trying not to be seen.The overhead light was the industrial kind — a flat, unflattering white that washed most people out.It did something different to him.
Graham was already there.
He was sitting on the landing two steps below her with a bundle of pink carnations in one hand and a donor tag clipped to the clear plastic wrap.The blue volunteer vest and lanyard.A navy ballcap that read BLOSSOM SPRINGS BAKERY in faded white letters.
She sat down across from him and didn't say hello.
"Show me."
She handed him the phone.
He scrolled through the three photos in the order she'd taken them.Supply cart.Log sheet.Handoff signature.His thumb moved across the screen with the particular economy of a man who'd read a lot of intelligence in his life and knew exactly how much of it mattered.
"Twenty-three kits."
