Chapter 6 - The Nurse at Midnight
The woman in the lobby wore a plain blue blouse and held a battered canvas tote.
She gave her name as Lorraine Pike.
I did not invite her upstairs.
Instead, we spoke beneath the security camera near the reception desk.
She looked at my uniform and began crying without making a sound.
“I promised him I wouldn't come unless it became dangerous,” she said.
“Which him?”
“Your father.”
She showed me an expired nursing license and a photograph of Dad sitting in a wheelchair beside a window.
His hair was thinner.
His face had aged.
But he was unmistakably alive when that image was taken.
The photograph was dated eleven months earlier.
My knees threatened to fold.
I held the reception counter until the feeling passed.
“Where is he?”
Lorraine hesitated.
“A private recovery residence outside Ocala.”
“What is he recovering from?”
“A stroke, complicated by years of interrupted care.”
She told us Dad had spent years under an assumed name, believing he was protecting me from those tied to the Sentinel file.
Later, after his stroke, Judith obtained control over his appointments and visitors.
Lorraine had seen letters addressed to me taken from his bedside drawer.
“She told him you refused to speak to him,” Lorraine whispered.
“She told me he chose not to speak to me.”
We stood in the same terrible silence.
Two people had been taught to hate each other's absence.
Ethan asked whether Lorraine had medical authorization to disclose what she knew.
“I brought only what Daniel explicitly asked me to bring,” she said.
She handed me an envelope bearing my name in Dad's handwriting.
Inside lay a single page.
Maya, if this reaches you, don't come alone, and don't tell Judith where you're going.
I read the words until the letters blurred.
The message was dated the previous week.
My father was alive.
My father knew I might come.
And he was afraid of my mother.
Before Lorraine could give us the address, her phone rang.
She looked at the screen and went still.
“Who is it?” I asked.
She turned the phone toward me.
The caller identification showed my own name.
May you like
I had never called her before.
