“Roxanne Ark?” she said as she stopped in front of me, clasping her hands together.

My brain screeched to a halt at the sound of my full name. My parents were bizarre. Like there was a good chance they were cokeheads in the eighties or something. I was named after the song “Roxanne,” and my brothers were Gordon and Thomas, which mostly made up Sting’s real name.

“Yes,” I said, reaching for the tote bag I’d brought with me.

Her smile remained firmly in place as she motioned to the closed double doors. “Nurse Venter is out today, but she explained that you come every Friday afternoon at noon, so we have Charlie ready.”

“Oh no, is she okay?” Concern pinged around me. Nurse Venter had become a friend over the last six years I visited. So much so that I knew her youngest son was finally getting married in October, and her middle child had just had her first grandchild last month, in July.

“She’s come down with an end-­of-­summer cold,” she explained. “She actually wanted to come in today, but we all figured it would be better if she took the weekend to recover.” The new nurse stepped aside as I stood. “She did tell me that you like to read to Charlie?”

I nodded as I tightened my grip on my tote.

Stopping at the doors, she tugged off her clipped name badge and swiped it over a sensor on the wall. There was a popping sound and then she pushed the door open. “He’s had an okay ­couple of days. Not as great as we’d like,” she continued as we stepped in the wide, brightly lit hall. The walls were white and bare. No personality. Nothing. “But he was up early this morning.”

My neon-­green flip-­flops smacked off the tile floors but the nurse’s sneakers made no noise. We passed the hall I knew led to the community room. Charlie was never a fan of hanging out in there, which was so strange, because before . . . before he’d been hurt, he’d been such a social butterfly.

He’d been a lot of things.

Charlie’s room was down another hall, a wing specially designed to have views of the sprawling green landscape and the therapeutic pool that Charlie had never enjoyed. He hadn’t been much of a swimmer before, but every time I saw that damn pool outside, I wanted to punch something. I don’t know what it was about it, maybe because it was something the rest of us took for granted—­the ability to swim on our own—­or maybe it was the fact that water always seemed so limitless to me, but Charlie’s future was severely limited.

The nurse stopped outside of his closed door. “When you’re ready to leave, you know the drill.”

I did. When I left, I had to stop by the nurses’ station and check out. I guessed they wanted to make sure I wasn’t trying to steal Charlie away or something. With a happy little nod in my direction, the nurse spun in her sneakers and power walked back down the hall.