“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.
