She was sixty-seven, with silver hair in a clip and forty years of night shifts in her hands.
She worked the Wednesday clinic at Grace Haven, and she had been standing by the kitchen window when Ashley said the word medication.
“I need to tell you something,” she said.
“I should have told someone five months ago.”
We sat around Loretta’s long oak table.
It smelled of lemon polish and old coffee.
Emily sat across from me with her hands around a mug she never drank from.
In her cardigan pocket, folded small, was the twenty from the porch.
I had watched her pick it up herself, after the headlights left.
“I was the night charge nurse on the maternity floor on November nineteenth,” Pam said.
“Emily had delivered three days before. Both babies were in the NICU. She hadn’t sl*pt in two days.”
“At 3:55 that morning, I gave her a sedative myself. It’s in the medication record.”
