Chapter 1
The bedroom didn't look like a place where someone was supposed to get better. It looked like a place where someone was supposed to be photographed getting better. The parquet shone like it had been polished that morning, the white trim was too white, and the gold frame around the landscape painting caught the daylight from the big window on the right and threw it straight across the hospital bed. I walked in from the left with my brown crossbody bag banging against my hip and my stethoscope already sweating against my neck, and the man in the dark suit didn't move. He stood near the window with his hands clasped in front of him, black sunglasses on indoors, watching me the way you watch a temp who might steal something. Under the dark blanket, the patient breathed shallow enough I had to listen for it.
That was the contradiction I felt in my chest before I even touched the bed rail. Everything was bright and clean and expensive and wrong.
My name is Maya Ellis. I was twenty-seven and on my third private-duty contract that month.
It was just after two in the afternoon when the agency sent me up. Day one. The address was a brick colonial on a quiet street where the lawns looked cut with scissors, and the inside had been converted without ever stopping being a bedroom. White chair with the dark wood frame tucked too neatly in the corner, nightstand pulled right up to the bed rail, a clear glass of water already beaded with condensation next to a lined notebook and a black pen. The job sheet said bedside care, vitals, medication administration as directed. The bottle was already there, small and amber with a white cap, sitting on the lip of the nightstand like someone had left it for me to find.
I adjusted my stethoscope with both hands. That was the pause. I can still feel the rubber tubing cold against my fingers, the way I had to breathe in once and hold it so my hands wouldn't shake. The window light made the piping on my collar and sleeves look too sharp, too costume. I didn't speak right away. I listened to the room — the faint hiss of the radiator, the patient's blanket shifting, my own breathing too loud inside the stethoscope I hadn't even placed yet.
Then I picked up the bottle.
Up close it was lighter than I expected. The plastic was warm from the sun. I held it near the white rail of the hospital bed, the white sheet blurred behind it, and my hand did the thing I hated. A fine tremor, just enough to make the liquid inside kiss the sides. No label except a handwritten dosage in black ink, half rubbed off. The amount the family wanted charted was not the amount the doctor had ordered on the intake sheet the agency forwarded that morning. I turned the bottle a quarter inch and back, shallow depth of field narrowing everything to that white cap and my knuckles. I wasn't supposed to decide. I was supposed to pour, chart, and let the glass of water do the rest.
From behind me the guard shifted his weight. Not a step, just leather creaking.
"Another one. My grandmother never knows when to quit." His voice was flat, tired, not looking at me but at the bed. It wasn't small talk. It was an assessment.
I didn't answer at first. I set the bottle down without opening it and moved to the nightstand, flipped the notebook open to the blank page they'd left for me. The cat was already there. I hadn't noticed it until then — a thin gray-white tabby curled on the far edge of the nightstand, eyes half closed, watching the glass of water like it owned it. I uncapped the black pen. My hand hovered.
He said it like a warning. Like he knew.
"I need the money. That doesn't make me bad at my job." I said it quiet, not looking up. It came out smaller than I wanted it to.
He didn't reply. The cat blinked slowly. The patient made a small sound under the blanket and then went still.
May you like
I stared at the lined page. The previous page had been torn out; the imprint of the writing was still pressed into the paper underneath, numbers I couldn't read without tilting it to the light. I knew what they wanted me to write. I knew what I'd seen in my hand. The pen tip rested on the paper and left a tiny dot of ink that bled into the fiber. The glass of water sweated onto the wood. The tabby's tail twitched once and its eyes fixed harder on the glass.
Behind me the doorknob turned. Someone was about to come in and ask if it was done.
