I barely slept those two nights. I lay on the pull-out chair beside Adeline’s bed running through every possibility, each one worse than the last. Had he told her something about her prognosis he shouldn’t have? Had something changed in her treatment plan that hadn’t been explained to me yet? I worked in emergency dispatch. I knew what it sounded like when professionals were protecting a family from something. I recognized the cadence of withheld bad news, because I’d heard it in my own voice on hundreds of calls.
I asked Grace directly, in the break room, whether something was wrong with Adeline’s treatment that I hadn’t been told.
“No,” Grace said, too quickly, and then looked like she regretted the speed of her own answer. “Morgan, it’s not that. I promise you it’s not that.”
“Then what is it?”
She hesitated, glanced toward the hallway, and said only, “It’s not my place. Talk to Josh when he’s ready.”
That was worse than any answer she could have given me.
By the third morning, I couldn’t stand it anymore. Adeline’s counts had dipped low enough that we were confined to her room, masks on for anyone entering, and the isolation made the silence between me and Josh feel even louder. I told her I’d be right back and went downstairs for coffee, mostly to put a wall between myself and my own spiraling thoughts for five minutes.
When the elevator doors opened back onto the pediatric floor, I knew before I saw anything that something had happened. The hallway outside Adeline’s room was too quiet, the kind of quiet a hospital only gets when everyone in earshot is holding their breath. Two nurses stood outside the door, and one of them, a young woman named Kayley, was wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist.
My coffee cup went cold in my hand. “What happened? Where’s my daughter?”
Grace turned toward me, and for the first time since I’d known her, I watched her steady professional face come apart at the edges. “Morgan—”
I didn’t wait. I pushed past her and shoved the door open so hard it hit the wall.
The coffee slipped from my hand and hit the linoleum, splitting open in a brown starburst across the floor.
Josh was sitting in the chair beside Adeline’s bed. His scrub sleeve was rolled up, and there was a fresh bandage taped over the crook of his left elbow, the kind you get after a long needle has been in for a while. He looked pale, hollowed out, the way people look after they’ve given something of themselves and haven’t gotten it back yet. Adeline was asleep, her small hand resting inside his.
And on the rolling tray beside the bed sat a clear medical bag, half empty, labeled with a chain of custody sticker and a name that made my knees go weak when I read it.
