I made it to the hospital in twelve minutes. I don’t remember most of the drive. I remember running from the parking lot with my mother’s ring clenched inside my fist so tightly the setting left a mark in my skin.
At the front desk, a woman in blue scrubs looked up as I skidded to a stop in front of her.
“I’m looking for my mother.” I pulled a folded flyer out of my bag and smoothed it flat on the counter, her photo staring up between us. “Her name is Evelyn. She’s been missing for four months.”
The receptionist studied the photo. “I’m sorry, I can’t give out patient information.”
“Please.” I opened the plastic bag and held the ring out where she could see it. “She was wearing this the day she disappeared. Last night, two people dropped it at the restaurant where I work. This morning they told a valet to call this hospital and say they were coming.”
Something shifted in her expression. She looked at the flyer again, then turned to her keyboard.
“What did the couple look like?”
I described them as fast as I could get the words out while she typed, my heart hammering somewhere up near my throat. Seconds crawled by. I have never in my life watched someone type so slowly.
“We don’t have anyone registered under the name Evelyn,” she said finally.
Something in my chest caved in.
Then she paused. Frowned at the screen.
“Wait.”
Her fingers moved again.
“We admitted an unidentified woman a few weeks ago. She came in confused, couldn’t tell us her name. She was moved up to the neurological unit for evaluation.”
My pulse spiked. “Does she look like the woman in that photo?”
“I can’t confirm that from down here.” Her voice softened, just slightly. “But the age and general description could match.”
“That’s her.” I heard my own voice crack. “It has to be her.”
She hesitated, glancing at something on the screen I couldn’t see. “The patient had a seizure yesterday. She’s stable, but she’s not really in a condition for visitors right now.”
“I’m her daughter.”
“She already has two visitors with her.”
The couple.
Every terrible possibility I could imagine hit me at once, one on top of the next. They had my mother’s ring. Maybe they’d followed her here on purpose. Maybe right now, upstairs, they were standing over her bed pressuring her for something, frightening a woman who couldn’t even remember her own name.
“You don’t understand,” I said, and I didn’t care anymore how my voice sounded. “Those people might have hurt her.”
The receptionist’s eyes flicked toward the security desk near the doors.
“Please,” I said, lower now, closer to begging than I’d ever let myself get with a stranger. “Just let me see her. If she isn’t my mother, I’ll walk right back out. But if she is—”
I couldn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t have to.
She picked up the phone and spoke quietly to someone upstairs. Then she printed a visitor badge and slid it across the counter to me.
“Third floor. Room 318. A nurse will meet you there.”
