falling, when a pickup truck ran a red light at fifty miles per hour and hit the driver’s side of her car so hard the frame folded inward like paper.
She doesn’t remember the impact. She doesn’t remember the glass. The paramedics would later tell her she was conscious for about ninety seconds — long enough to say her name — and then nothing. Traumatic brain swelling, four broken ribs, internal hemorrhaging. The emergency team at St. Catherine’s — her own hospital, where she had worked for six years — opened her up within the hour.
But the bleeding wouldn’t stop. A second surgery was needed. A specialist. More time. And someone had to authorize it.
The emergency contact on her hospital file was the name that had been there since she was eighteen: Gerald Thomas. Her father. Next of kin.
The hospital called him at ten-thirty that night. He arrived at ten-forty-seven — the
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