One of the dirt and frost still caught under her fingernails.
I wrote the time on a yellow sticky note and placed it beside my retired nurse badge.
At 4:18 a.m., I checked her pupils again.
At 4:21 a.m., I checked her abdomen, her breathing, and the way her body reacted when she shifted.
At 4:24 a.m., I locked the deadbolt.
Maya watched me from the bench with one eye swollen shut and the other full of fear.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“What I should have done the first time they made you apologize for being hurt,” I said.
I opened the old contacts folder in my phone.
There was a number I had not called in almost eight years.
Arthur.
My brother.
Senior partner at a law firm that handled the kind of families whose last names appeared on hospital wings, scholarship funds, and marble lobby walls.
