The man stood. The game was over. “You’ll need a pass.” He pointed down the hall to the reception desk at the main entrance. “Someone there can help you.”

Reception was staffed by a blue-haired woman wearing pearls and an open white smock. Rhinestone glasses hung from a silver chain around her neck. Two more security guards were there to back her up, but neither gave Ted a look. They were both engaged in examining something compelling on a computer monitor.

“I’m here to see a patient. McKenzie Zielinski.” He spelled it. “She’s probably still in the ER.”

She tapped on her keyboard for a moment. Her smile changed to a pursed-lip moue. “She’s not in the ER.”

“Was she released?” He’d missed her. How was he going to maneuver around her parents to get to see her?

“It seems she’s been moved to the ICU. Are you family?”

“ICU” sent Ted into a tailspin. A fractured ankle didn’t land you in intensive care, so it must have been the head wound. He felt a cold sweat form on the back of his neck.

“I’m her fiancé,” he said. He couldn’t risk being turned away.

The woman answered a phone and without a greeting said, “Hold, please.” She looked up at Ted as though he had only then appeared. “Yes?”

“I need a pass for the ICU,” he said with as much forbearance as he could muster.

She tapped some more. A small device on the counter began to chatter, and a visitor pass chugged out of the printer. “Second floor.”

The two uniformed guards had never looked up.

The elevator traveled between floors with the speed of a sloth on painkillers. Ted would have taken the stairs, but he didn’t know where they were. When the doors finally parted, he was through them and down the corridor in a flash.

He swiped his pass at an electronic lock, and the door swung open onto another corridor. This one was quiet, with muted lighting. The walls were all glass so that every occupied bed could be seen from the nurses’ station. Ted stopped there.

“McKenzie Zielinski?” he said.

There were six people working at computer monitors behind the counter. Not one person looked up.

“Room four.”

Ted didn’t stop to figure out who had responded. “Thanks,” he said over his shoulder.

He stopped at the door of room 4 and stared. Kenzie was hooked up to even more monitors. A breathing mask covered much of her face, and a saline drip had also been added. The long bruise on the side of her head and face had cast multicolored tendrils across her forehead and cheek. But she appeared peaceful.

“You can go in,” a voice said from behind him. He turned. A nurse in blue scrubs was standing there. The suggestion had the feel of an order.