I grabbed the badge so fast I nearly tore it.
“Miss?” she called after me as I turned to go. “Prepare yourself. She may not recognize you.”
PART 6 — Room 318
The elevator took the longest thirty seconds of my life.
When the doors opened on the third floor, a nurse walked me down a hallway that felt too quiet for what I knew was waiting at the end of it. She stopped outside room 318. Through the narrow window in the door, I could see the couple from Bellamy’s standing on either side of a hospital bed.
The woman still had on the same green dress from the night before, wrinkled now, slept in. The man’s silver hair stood up on one side like he’d been running his hands through it for hours. Neither one of them looked like the polished, unhurried couple who’d ordered a $60 bottle of wine twelve hours earlier. They looked wrecked. Hollowed out.
I pushed the door open.
The woman turned first. Her eyes dropped to the plastic bag still clutched in my hand, and her face went white.
“That ring,” she whispered.
I stepped between them and the bed before I even decided to. “Where did you get this?”
“Please.” The man raised both hands, palms out. “The patient needs quiet.”
“You stole this from my mother.”
“Your — mother?” The woman’s voice cracked in the middle of the word.
I looked past both of them, down at the bed, and everything else in the room went silent in my ears.
For four months I had pictured this moment a thousand different ways. In none of them had my mother looked this small. Evelyn Mercer lay beneath a thin white blanket, her face pale and thinner than I remembered, an IV line taped across the back of one hand.
But it was her.
