"Her name is June Daly. Her mother is Crystal Daly, twenty-four years old. On October twenty-eighth a housekeeper at the Starlite Motel on Route 145 found Crystal unresponsive on the bathroom floor of room eleven. Fentanyl overdose. EMS brought her back, but she'd been down a long time. She was on a ventilator in the ICU here at St. Agnes for nine days. She had no ID on her. She was admitted as a Jane Doe."
Sam stared at her. "Here? She's been here? In this hospital?"
"Two floors up. She's on the medical step-down unit now." Gloria put her glasses back on. "When she woke up, she was confused for a long time. Memory gaps. Speech problems. It's only in the last few days that she's been clear enough to tell anyone who she was. And the first thing she asked, the very first thing, was where her daughter was."
Sam put his hand over his eyes.
"The police went to the boyfriend's apartment two days ago. Richard Voss. He told them June was staying with Crystal's sister in Scranton. There is no sister in Scranton. By the time they figured that out, Voss was gone. They issued a missing child alert yesterday afternoon." Gloria paused. "You probably didn't see it. Not many people did. It didn't have a photo yet."
"I didn't see it," Sam said. "I was watching my daughter."
"Well," Gloria said, "that turned out to be the right thing to watch."
They sat for a while in silence. A nurse went by pushing a cart. Down the hall, a baby was crying, thin and tired.
"The foster home," Sam said finally. "The one with the belt."
"I can't tell you much about that." Gloria's voice changed, went careful and hard at the same time. "But I can tell you I've read the file, and I can tell you that June's placement there was in another county, and that the family is no longer licensed, and that as of tonight, with what you and Dr. Patel have documented, there's going to be a criminal referral. I've been doing this twenty-six years, Mr. Whitley. Most foster parents are good people. Some of them are the best people I've ever known. But the system's only as good as the worst house in it, and that child got the worst house. I'm sorry for that. I'm not going to let it happen to her twice."
"Where does she go?" Sam asked. "When she gets out of here."
Gloria looked at him for a long moment over the tops of her glasses.
"That's the question you're really asking, isn't it."
"She calls me Daddy," Sam said. He did not know how to explain it. "I've known her for four hours. I know that's crazy. I know there are rules. But she trusts me. I promised her I'd stay. I don't want to be one more grown-up who promises something and then hands her off. My daughter already told me I'm good at that, and she was right."