Hal and I followed Betsy Whittier as she guided us from the patient relations conference room to Cally’s recovery room. The three of us turned each corner with the precision of a pack of race cars, and as we cruised the long hallway, we passed the drinking fountain and the nurses’ station. The night nurses were handing off to the seven a.m. shift. They ceased chatting to watch with serious faces.

“Good morning,” I said without smiling.

Clip, clop, clip, clop. We strode past the faded construction-paper display board with all the same facts about all the same nurses. Everything was the same, and nothing was the same.

“I spent practically the whole day here yesterday,” I said.

“I know,” said Hal.

As we neared Cally’s room, a part of me hoped that there had been a mistake, that she’d still be sitting there in bed, struggling to nurse the baby, and the baby would cry and we’d pick her up and she’d stop crying and we’d take her home and never come back, and all of this middle-of-the-night drama had simply been some kind of bad dream.

But that wasn’t the case.

We slowed down as we approached her room and stopped in the doorway. I looked at the open bathroom door. Maybe she was in there and no one had remembered to check it. We walked all the way in and saw that the place was empty.

“That was fast,” said Hal.

“For crying out loud. Will you look at that,” I said, gaping. The room was unrecognizable: it had already been cleaned. The bed was made, there were no clothes, no personal effects, and no bassinet. The whiteboard was blank, and the window was intact. There was no sign of her ever having been there. I walked outside to check the room number again. Yep, this was it. “Where’s her stuff?” I asked, looking in the small closets near the door.

“I’m sure if there were any items left behind,” said the director, “they would have been placed in the hospital lost and found.”

“How could you do this?” I said, looking in the bathroom.

“Do what, Mrs. Olson? Clean the room?” The director looked at her watch. “It’s already seven o’clock on a Saturday morning. The rooms are cleaned first thing, standard procedure. I’m sure we’ll have another patient very soon, that’s how it goes, especially on maternity. I’m sure you understand.”

“No, I don’t understand.” I sat on the bed.

“And we’ll need to clean it again since we are in here,” said the director. “It’s no longer sterile.”

“No longer sterile?”

“Ruth.” Hal sat next to me and put his arm around me.

“I expected there to be, like, yellow tape cordoning off the area, to preserve the evidence.”

“It’s not a crime scene,” said the director.