When she crashed, the sheriff asked her how many fingers of whiskey she’d had.

“To be honest, sir,” she answered, “it was more like hands.” But she didn’t remember. That was the worst part—or the best part, depending—the nights that were completely gone to her. Which sometimes meant waking up in her own bed, or on the couch, or in someone else’s bed, or in the worst case, in a hospital bed.

The sheriff put her on leave. He asked to see her every two weeks, with some documentation of the AA meetings.

And then the house on Allen Street sold and Kateri hired a cleanout team to come take everything that wasn’t already on her body or in a small bag. There was nothing left for her. Her father had died years ago, alone in a shitty high-rise on the south side. Her mother, dead when Kateri was sixteen.

She had died on the couch. Only thirty-one to Kateri’s sixteen. Her toxicology report proved what they already knew. She had taken a deadly combination of alcohol and painkillers and benzos. It wasn’t a night unlike other nights. It was just the night that killed her.

When Hamilton County called with a second interview, the wound on Kateri’s chin had healed to a thin pink slice you could see only if she tilted her face up. She’d been to six meetings, where she rarely talked, just listened to the same confessions over and over, another face, another accident, another car crash, and more tears. She might have died on the couch the way her mother had. Instead, she bought a different car, she put a few things in the back, and she moved up north. She felt spared.

By the time she gets to Mercy, it’s getting dark, and the rain has come, saturating, steady. It feels like it will never end, that this is the world now, wet and shining. The parking lot runs with sheets of water, moving toward the gutter.

She walks past the nurses’ station and down the empty hallway. When she doesn’t see the officer, she assumes they have taken the girl for some testing. The tests have been extensive: hearing, eyesight, brain scans, chest X-rays. They haven’t found anything wrong with her. And not a hair on her has been harmed.

But she finds Birdie’s room empty, her bed stripped. It catches Kateri so off guard that she just stands there in the doorway, looking in at the generic room, all signs of any patient gone. When they took her for testing before, everything was left behind: blankets, her chart, a pitcher of water. This room is now sterile.

Kateri goes back to the nurses’ station.

“Jane Doe,” she says. “Sparrow Annie Jenkins,” she repeats. “In room four-four-oh-six?”

“Discharged,” the nurse says.

“When?”

“This morning,” she says. Behind her, the phone rings, stops, and then rings again so that the nurse has to hold up a finger, asking Kateri to wait.

She takes the call, and an attending doctor comes by with files. Another nurse slips in behind the desk to pull up information on another patient.