But I can still smell antiseptic and something warm underneath it—something that was just her—and my hand remembers the almost-touch of her fingers when she handed me those discharge papers.
I put the coin back in my pocket and head for the main room.
There's paperwork that needs filing and a ledger that won't balance itself, and my hands need something to do that isn't thinking about things I can't afford to want.
The quiet ones don't get to want things. We just hold everything together and hope the weight doesn't kill us.
Luckily, it hasn't yet.
CHAPTER TWO
Leah
The girl on my table is twenty-three years old and she's dying.
Not in the slow, grinding way that most people die—the years of bad choices and worse luck piling up until the body finally saysenough.
This is fast.
This is fentanyl-laced methamphetamine hitting a hundred-and-twenty-pound woman like a freight train, and I've got maybe four minutes to pull her back before her brain decides it's done.
"Narcan's in. No response." I keep my voice flat. Professional. The kind of steady that comes from six years of watching people try to leave this world on my shift. "Pushing a second dose."
The ER around me moves in the chaos that I've long since stopped noticing—monitors screaming, another nurse cutting the girl's shirt open, Dr. Boggs calling orders from two feet away.
I push the second dose of naloxone and watch the girl's face for any sign that she's still in there.
She's blonde.
Not Wrenleigh's white-gold—more of a dirty dishwater shade, roots growing in dark.
But she's young and she's blonde and she's somebody's daughter, and I can't afford to think about that right now so I don't.
"Come on," I mutter. "Come on, come on, come on?—"
Her chest heaves.
One breath, then another, ragged and desperate, like someone surfacing from deep water.
Her eyes fly open—pupils blown, unfocused, terrified—and she starts to thrash.
"There she is. Hold her—gently. She's going to be confused."
The girl grabs my wrist.
Her fingernails dig in hard enough to draw blood through my glove, and she looks at me with eyes that don't see me at all and says, "Please don't tell my mom."
Twenty-three years old. Please don't tell my mom.
I hold her hand and I talk her down the way I've talked down dozens of people clawing their way back from the edge—calm, firm, present.
Her name is Brianna.
She bought what she thought was meth from a friend of a friend at a party off Campus Drive.
She didn't know it was cut with fentanyl.
She didn't know that the high she was chasing came with a side of cardiac arrest.
