But these aren't normal circumstances. Maya showed up here with everything she owns in garbage bags, and she's not eating, not sleeping, flinching at shadows. Something happened. Something bad enough that she ran.
I need to know what I'm dealing with, need to know how to help.
That's what I tell myself as I pick up the journal.
The pages are filled with her handwriting: quick, slanted, sometimes barely legible. No dates. Just words and drawings scattered across pages like she was trying to get them out of her head as fast as possible.
Some pages have sketches. Dark, twisted things. Hands reaching, pills scattered like stars, a small blade drawn with careful detail. A child's outline, faint and ghostlike.
I flip through, reading fragments at random. My stomach turns with every page.
The blade helps. I know it shouldn't. I know it's not healthy, but it works. The pain is clean. Simple. Something I control when everything else is too much.
I know where the arteries are. Studied them. Could end it fast if I wanted to. Sometimes I think about it—how easy it would be. How quiet.
I turn the page. More sketches of blades. Pills arranged in patterns.
But not yet. Not today. Today, I just need to feel something that isn't him.
Him.
I flip back further, hands shaking now.
I can't stop seeing her face. Lily. Over a year, and she's still there every time I close my eyes. I still hear her monitor. I still feel her ribs under my hands.
Six years old. Six. She should be in second grade now. Should be losing teeth and learning to read.
I should have caught it sooner. Should have pushed harder. Should have known.
My fault. It's all my fault.
The next page has a drawing of a hospital room. A small bed. A flatline across the top of the page.
I keep flipping. The handwriting gets messier, more frantic.
His hands were on me in the supply closet. I remember stuff digging into my spine. I couldn't move. Couldn't scream. I just froze like the pathetic fucking coward I am.
He took everything. My body. My job. My sense of safety. I reported him, and they fired me. Two weeks later. Budget cuts, they said, as if I don't know what that means.
The hospital chose him. His salary, his office, his fucking reputation. I'm the problem. The troublemaker. The nurse who couldn't handle it.
My vision blurs. I blink hard, and the words come back into focus.
Hands that took what wasn't offered.
Another page. Just five words, written over and over until the pen tore through the paper.
It should have been me.
The journal slips from my hands and hits the counter. I make it to the sink just in time to throw up everything in my stomach.
Someone raped her.
Her supervisor. At the hospital. And when she reported it, they fired her.
I grip the edge of the sink, water still running, my whole body shaking with rage so intense I can barely breathe. She'scutting herself, thinking about suicide, blaming herself for a patient's death that happened over a year ago, and a rape that wasn't her fucking fault.
And I had no idea.
