Ten minutes later, I was pushing through the ambulance entrance, still in the same sweater I had fallen asleep in. Alan was waiting outside Trauma Two, his face drained in a way I had never seen before—not even on the worst nights of my career.
“Where’s Emily?” I asked.
He didn’t reply. He simply pulled the curtain aside.
My daughter lay face down on the bed, sedated, her blond hair damp with sweat, her fingers twitching faintly against the sheet. The back of her hospital gown had been cut open. At first, I thought the dark streaks across her skin were bruises.
Then it hit me.
They weren’t bruises.
They were words.
A message had been carved into her back—shallow, deliberate cuts, still fresh enough for blood to bead along the edges. Not random. Not reckless. Intentional. Controlled. Personal.
I stepped closer, my legs suddenly unsteady.
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