“It’s not in there,” Damien says, shutting the office door behind him. He remains standing this time. “Could you have left it someplace?”
“I—I don’t know.” My anxiety spikes. If I don’t have my purse, I don’t have my phone. Or my wallet, either.
“Where did you come from just now? From home?”
I stare up at him, not comprehending at first, my heart beginning to hammer.
And then it hits me that I have no sense of that, either—where I was before I arrived or where my home is. There’s a thick, dark curtain between this moment and everything that came before it.
Damien says something else, but I can barely hear him. The outer rings of my vision shrink so that he now looks tiny, like he’s at the end of a peephole. A wave of nausea swells inside me.
I sense myself start to slump in the chair and before I can straighten up, I keel over onto the floor.
3
Aloud hum fills my head, and I hear beeping, too.
Then a woman’s voice, talking into a phone or radio. “The patient is currently conscious, but not alert,” she says. “Twelve-lead ECG is unremarkable.” There are other snippets: “BP:120/80... pulse 100. Blood sugar is 120.... No HX or seizures, unknown medications.”
I force my eyes open to see that I’m in an ambulance on a gurney with my coat and shirt open and little white discs stuck to my chest. I don’t hear a siren, but the lights must be flashing, because I can see their red reflection dancing on the inside walls of the vehicle.
It comes back in a rush. Damien’s office. Not remembering. The dizziness. Blacking out.
Panic bubbles up inside me and then geysers, shooting to the very end of my fingers and toes. I twist my head to the left as far as I’m able to. A dark-haired woman sits next to me on a jump seat, dressed in black pants and a white shirt. Her eyes flick between several monitors on the inside wall of the ambulance.
She catches me looking at her and smiles.
“How you feeling, hon? Any better?”
“A little,” I tell her, but really, I don’t have a clue, not having a baseline to judge it against. “Can you tell me what happened to me?”
“You passed out, and your colleague was having trouble fully reviving you. I did a quick test for hypoglycemia and it came up negative. Do you have any history of that?”
I have a vague memory of my finger being pricked with a needle, back in Damien’s office. I was on the floor, my arms and legs too limp to move.
“Um, not that I’m aware of.”
“Any history of fainting?”
“No. I mean, I don’t think so.”
“It’s possible you’re just dehydrated. Your vitals are normal, at least.”
I lift my arm and notice that there’s an IV needle inserted into my vein.
“It’s just saline, to get you hydrated,” she says. “Be careful not to dislodge it.”
“Okay,” I say, grateful to have someone telling me what to do.
“The person who was with you said you were having trouble with your recall this morning. Can you tell me your name?”
“Ally. Ally Linden.”
“And how old are you, Ally?”
“Thirty-four.” I feel a flood of relief that the number spilled from my lips without me even having to think about it.
“Good. Can you tell me where you live—the actual address?”
