Nora spoke first, voice low, stripped of desk authority. "Ms. Reeves. I—how's he doing?"
"He's doing," Alana said. "Which is the point. He's here for numbers that are supposed to be boring."
Nora nodded. Her hands were tight on the cart handle, knuckles whitening and then releasing as if she were practicing not gripping the past so hard it broke. "I still think about that night. I don't say that for credit. Credit would be disgusting."
"Good," Alana said. "Because there isn't any. There is only what you do with the next shift."
A beat. The elevator dinged. Devin cheered softly at his own button-pressing excellence, a small king of a small panel.
"I'm not asking you to forgive me," Nora said. "I am telling you I hear him now, in my head, when someone says it's probably nothing. I hear your voice saying oxygen. That may be the only useful thing I can offer you, and even that belongs more to the next family than to you."
Alana considered the woman in teal scrubs who was no longer the gatekeeper of the desk. She considered the months, the audit, the protocol, the statement, the fact that systems changed sideways more often than they changed clean, and that sideways was still a direction. She considered her son breathing easily beside her, dinosaur hoodie two sizes too big because Florence believed in room to grow and refused to shop small for children she loved.
"Offer it to the next child," Alana said. "Not to me. I don't need your hearing as a gift. I needed it that night."
Nora's mouth twitched—not a smile, an acknowledgment of a debt that could not be prepaid with remorse. "Fair."