The Girl from Widow Hills - Megan Miranda Page 0,63

on Mondays, but I walked by the nurses’ lounge, just in case his schedule had shifted to accommodate the past weekend. The only person inside was the woman with auburn hair, on her phone again. Same as last week, when I’d backed into the medicine room.

I was overcome with a vague sense of déjà vu. I knew the nurses who worked up here best. Though everyone could use the lounge, they were the ones who’d usually be resting on the couch.

A door opened behind me, a man in scrubs leaving the medicine room. He saw me standing there and smiled. “Morning,” he said. But he took a minute turning the lock to the medicine room behind him, even as I walked away.

My stomach churned, imagining the stories. It was the same feeling I had gotten ten years earlier, people watching and talking, before the panic attack that I didn’t know was a panic attack. The slow buildup, and the rapid unraveling, before I recognized it for what it was and could put a name to the physical reaction.

Would it escalate, as it had back then? The comments? The attention? Until I found myself trapped—at the mercy of something else beyond my control?

Ten years earlier, everything had boiled over with an incident in the gym locker room.

Their voices still echoed a decade later.

Living off other people’s hard-earned money—

My parents said they donated, probably paid for your house—

A group of girls scattered around me. One in particular standing between me and the exit of the gym locker room, the walls narrowing as the voices grew. Until I had to move. Had to get out.

The school counselor attributed the incident to PTSD, but it didn’t change the reaction. I was sent home for a week. I was just lucky it hadn’t made it on the news.

But it was a good story. Describe her in three words: angry, unpredictable, dangerous.

My mother stressed the need to stay offline, to keep random people on the Internet from contacting me on social media, and private messages, and lesser-known chat rooms. I had quickly learned never to search for my own name. But I still saw it, heard about it. Kids bartered information, discovered the power of it. At that age, it was what we had.

Ten years later, we hadn’t much changed. We all just had more access to the truth and the lies.

IN MY OFFICE BETWEEN meetings, I pulled up Elyse’s employment file. I hadn’t been involved in the hiring process, not since I’d taken on my full-time role.

But this was all information at my disposal. If she’d gone home, as Bennett suggested, I might find another contact number in her file—to put my mind at ease. To stop seeing the image of her staring out my window, frowning.

If my mother could see me now, I was sure she’d laugh. Call me, in an offhand way, the powers that be. That unseen, unnamed force that determined her fate each time she was removed from a position or reassigned. The powers that gave her shit hours, or denied her employment, or ignored her situation. The powers that be were unwavering and unsympathetic. Robotic assholes, I think was her preferred term. And now here I was.

But I was nothing like she’d imagined us to be. I wanted to make a difference. Fix a broken system from the top down.

The small thumbnail photo with Elyse’s ID badge was up on the screen, grainy to the degree of blurry, along with her original application. Elyse Ferano was twenty-five and had three different places of employment before landing here, including a few months’ gap in between, noted as a medical leave. I remembered she’d mentioned a bad accident, and I wondered if she had follow-up issues. It had been the same for my arm.

But still. She had moved around a lot in the time allotted. I wondered who had hired her, how she’d gotten through the referral calls. She’d listed previous jobs from all over the state. Her most recent referral was from a rehab facility near the coast, at least four hours away. I couldn’t tell which place she might consider home.

On impulse, I called the most recent contact name.

“Henry Masters,” he answered on the first ring.

“Hi, my name is Olivia, and I’m calling in regard to a referral for a previous employee of yours.” I’d opted against giving away my information unless specifically asked.

“Hold on,” he said. Then, “Go ahead,” like he was pulling up the files on his own