Nora's jaw set. Behind her, the phone lit with another call. The queue screen showed twelve, then thirteen. "I see forty people a night who think they're the exception."
"And sometimes one of them is," Edith said. "Tonight one of them was. And before you tell me about staffing, I raised three kids on a teacher's salary and still knew when to stop grading papers and dial 911. Being tired is not a clinical assessment."
Nora turned back to her folders because looking at Edith felt like standing under a fluorescent truth she was not ready to name. The lights hummed. Somewhere down the hall a bed wheeled past with a squeak that needed fixing and would not be fixed this month because maintenance tickets aged like cheese in a drought. She had been short two nurses since ten o'clock. She had eaten half a protein bar at nine and nothing since. Her lower back ached in the exact place it always ached after twelve hours of standing and pivoting and telling people to wait. Her ex-husband had texted at dinner about their daughter's tuition and the message still sat unread because there had been no dinner, only the idea of one. None of that, she knew even as she listed it privately like exhibits for a defense attorney who lived in her skull, turned seventy-nine percent into a number you could ask to sit down.
She wrote the time of the pediatric call in the log because Rita would ask for it. She wrote it accurately. Accuracy was the closest thing she had, in that moment, to absolution, and it was not close enough.
Alana called her mother from a plastic chair outside PICU evaluation at 2:03 a.m., when Devin had been moved for closer watching and the corridor smelled of disinfectant and cold coffee.
Florence Reeves answered on the second ring, voice already awake. Florence had raised three children on a school secretary's salary and the kind of vigilance that never fully slept, a vigilance born in a city that taught Black mothers to keep documents ready and questions sharp. "Talk to me."
"Devin's in the ER. Asthma. Bad. They're watching him. Sats were in the seventies when we got here." Alana swallowed. The corridor lights made her eyes water, or maybe that was not the lights. "A nurse told me to take a number."
Silence, then the sound of Florence moving—keys, coat, the decisive rustle of a woman who did not waste minutes on disbelief. "Which hospital?"
"Harborview."
"I'm coming. Have you called Andre?"