The elevator doors opened. Alana steered Devin inside. As the doors closed, she saw Nora already moving again, cart wheels whispering over linoleum, a person mid-reckoning rather than finished with one. Alana found that she preferred mid to finished. Finished was a story hospitals liked to tell when they wanted the file closed and the mural photographed.
In the elevator glass, Alana caught her own face: tired, intact, unwilling to confuse closure with justice. Devin leaned against her, warm, ordinary.
"Was that a nurse from before?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Is she mad at us?"
"No," Alana said. "She's learning. Learning takes longer than a night, and it doesn't erase the night."
Devin accepted this with the philosophy of a child who had other priorities and a stomach already imagining salt. "After my test can we get the soft pretzels with the cheese that tastes like plastic?"
"Yes," Alana said, and meant the word in every direction it could travel—toward dough and dubious cheese, toward ordinary hunger, toward a future in which a boy could want a snack more than he needed oxygen, toward evenings when the worst decision was bedtime.
Spring brought the hospital's six-month audit report in a PDF that tried to sound proud without sounding defensive and mostly sounded like a PDF. Rita Chen called Alana personally, which was either kindness or strategy and possibly both, because Rita understood that families disappeared into "closed" statuses unless someone kept a human line open.