“An unidentified woman was admitted several weeks ago. She was brought in confused and unable to remember her name. She was transferred to our neurological unit for evaluation.”
My heart began pounding. “Does she look like the woman in that picture?”
“I can’t confirm that from here.” Her voice softened. “But the age and description are close.”
“That’s her. It has to be.”
The receptionist hesitated. “The patient suffered a seizure yesterday. She’s stable, but she isn’t in good condition to receive visitors.”
“She already has two people with her.”
“I’m her daughter.”
“She already has two people with her.”
The couple.
Every terrible possibility struck me at once. They had taken my mother’s ring. Perhaps they had followed her here. Perhaps they were beside her bed right now, frightening her or pressuring her to reveal something she could no longer remember.
“You don’t understand,” I said. “Those people may have hurt her.”
I couldn’t finish.
The receptionist glanced toward the security desk.
“Please,” I begged, lowering my voice. “Just let me see her. If she isn’t my mother, I’ll leave. But if she is…”
I couldn’t finish.
After a long moment, the receptionist picked up the phone and spoke quietly to someone upstairs. Then she printed a visitor badge and slid it toward me.
“Third floor. Room 318. A nurse will meet you there.”
“She may not recognize you.”
I grabbed the badge.
“And miss?” she called as I turned away. “Prepare yourself. She may not recognize you.”
The elevator seemed to take forever.
When the doors opened, a nurse led me down a silent corridor and stopped outside room 318. Through the narrow window, I saw the couple from Bellamy’s standing beside the bed.
The woman still wore her green dress, though it was wrinkled now. The man’s silver hair was disheveled. Neither looked elegant anymore. They looked exhausted.
“That ring.”
I pushed open the door.
The woman turned. Her eyes widened when she saw the plastic bag in my hand.
“That ring,” she whispered.
I stepped between them and the bed. “Where did you get it?”
“Please,” the man said, raising his hands. “The patient needs quiet.”
“You stole this from my mother.”
The woman stared at me. “Your mother?”
I looked down.
For four months, I had imagined this moment in a thousand different ways. In none of them had my mother seemed so small. Evelyn Mercer lay beneath a white blanket, her face pale and thin, an IV taped to her hand.
Her eyelids fluttered, but she didn’t wake.
But it was her.
“Mom?”
Her eyelids fluttered, but she didn’t wake.
My knees weakened. I caught the bedrail to keep myself standing.
“Who are you?” I demanded. “What did you do to her?”
“Nothing.” Tears filled the woman’s eyes. “We found her.”
Her name was Margaret, and the man was her husband, Thomas. Several weeks earlier, they had been driving home when they spotted my mother wandering beside a road outside town.
“We found her.”
She was barefoot, disoriented, and unable to say where she lived. She had no purse, phone, or identification.
They called an ambulance and followed it to the hospital.
“She wouldn’t let go of my hand,” Margaret said. “Every time I tried to leave, she became frightened.”
Doctors believed my mother had suffered an injury that affected her memory. The hospital reported her as unidentified, but no one connected her to my missing-person case in another jurisdiction.
“She wouldn’t let go of my hand.”
“The nurses removed the ring during her examination,” Thomas explained. “She kept trying to put it back on, but it was loose. Margaret offered to hold it so it wouldn’t disappear.”
“There are so many people coming in and out of these rooms,” Margaret added. “I was afraid someone might steal it. I kept it in my purse for safekeeping.”
They had visited nearly every day since then. Last night was their anniversary, and after weeks of living between home and the hospital, they finally went out for dinner.
My mother had suffered a seizure.
