Officer Vance walked in twenty minutes later, his leather duty belt creaking with every step. He held a blue clipboard and checked his wristwatch before he stopped at the side of my bed.
“Ms. Nora,” he said in his low, gravelly voice. “I need you to look over this statement regarding the incident with the monitor cord. I wrote down what the nurse reported, but I need your signature to file the report.”
He handed me a single sheet of paper attached to his clipboard. I held it with both hands, my eyes tracing the typed words that described Tessa pulling the cord from the wall.
“She was upset,” I said, my finger tapping against my thigh under the sheet.
“Upset is one thing,” Vance said, checking his watch again. “Unplugging life-support equipment is another. We take that very seriously.”
As I reached for the pen he offered, my sleeve brushed against the white plastic folder with blue lettering that the admitting nurse had left on my bedside table earlier that morning. The folder fell open, spilling a few photocopied pages onto the floor.
