The call came at 1:47 AM.
I know because I was awake. I am always awake. I'd been sitting in the chair beside Stella's bed with my feet tucked under me and my head tipped back against the wall, doing that thing that isn't quite sleep—where your body goes somewhere but your ears stay behind. The monitor's green lines. The ventilator's rhythm. The particular silence of a hospital at night, which isn't silence at all but a held breath.
Then Julien's voice cut through the door. Low, urgent. Moving fast.
He came in without knocking.
"Shay's in the ER." He was already grabbing his jacket off the hook. "Car accident. She's losing blood and the hospital's out of her type. You need to come."
I looked at him. Then I looked at Stella.
"I can't leave her."
"There's a night nurse on the floor."
"She woke up three times last night. She doesn't know the night nurse, she—"
"Lara." He stopped moving. His voice dropped into that register. The one that isn't loud but has no give in it anywhere. "She could die. Are you really this selfish?"
The word landed like a hand flat on a table.
Selfish.
I had not slept in a real bed in nine days. I had eaten half a container of yogurt at some point on Thursday and couldn't remember what day it was now. My body felt like something wrung out and left to dry. And I was sitting in a chair in a sterile room at two in the morning watching my daughter's chest rise and fall, counting the breaths the way I had been counting them since the surgery, because if I stopped counting I didn't know what I would do.
Selfish.
I stood up.
I pressed my lips to Stella's forehead—she stirred, didn't wake—and I tucked Bun more firmly under her arm and I followed Julien out the door.
---
The ER was bright and loud and smelled like everything hospitals smell like when you've been living in the filtered quiet of a private ward. A nurse took my information. Julien was already gone—I saw the back of his jacket disappearing through a set of doors.
They brought me to a donation bay. I sat in the chair and held out my arm and answered the intake questions on autopilot.
Last meal: I had to think about it.
Hours of sleep in the past forty-eight: I didn't answer that one honestly.
The needle went in. I watched the dark line of it move through the tubing and I thought about Stella's face when she slept. The way her mouth went soft. The way her hand always found Bun even in the middle of the night.
The lights got very bright.
Then they got very far away.
Then there was a ceiling above me that wasn't the ceiling of the donation bay, and a different kind of fluorescent, and someone was saying my name from somewhere outside my body.
---
I woke on a gurney with an IV in my arm and a blood pressure cuff cycling on my wrist.
A nurse told me I'd passed out. Acute anemia. My levels were already low before the donation. She said it matter-of-factly, the way Dr. Freeman says things, and I appreciated that.
I asked where Julien was.
She paused just long enough. "He stepped out a while ago. I think he went back upstairs."
Upstairs. To Shay's room.
I lay there and stared at the ceiling tiles and counted them. Twelve across. Eight down. There was a water stain in the third tile from the left in the second row that looked like nothing in particular.
Shay's "emergency" turned out to be three stitches. I found that out later. Three stitches and a performance so convincing it had pulled me out of my daughter's room at two in the morning on an empty body running on nine days of deficit.
Three stitches.
Noa came at 4 AM. She didn't ask questions. She signed my discharge paperwork, handed me a coffee, and walked me to her car.
We drove in silence through the empty streets. The city was dark and wet. The coffee was too hot but I held it with both hands anyway.
Twenty minutes. Maybe more.
I watched the streetlights move across the window glass.
Then I said it. Quietly. No inflection. Like I was reading a fact off a page.
"I need the name of a forensic accountant."
Noa didn't flinch. Didn't pause. Didn't look at me.
"I already have one on retainer," she said.
I nodded.
I looked back out the window.
Something had closed inside me. Not broken—closed. The way a door closes when someone has finally, completely decided to stop leaving it open.
I finished the coffee.
The city moved past in the dark.
I started making a list.
