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He shuffled the folders and squared them before he slid one out from the middle of the stack and tucked it flat against his chest in the way you carry a thing you don’t want read over your shoulder.

“You’re low on saline and the sharps container in bay two is at the line,” he said, and it came out too fast and too loud.

“Deal with that this morning before anything else.”

I frowned at that, as the sharps container in bay two was about half full. In fact, I had emptied it myself two days ago.

“Sure,” I said pleasantly instead of questioning this.

“Anything else?” I asked, trying not to give away the fact that I knew he was acting strangely.

“No. No, that’s um… that’s all.” He was already moving, speaking at me over his shoulder.

“I’ll be in the admin wing. Don’t page me unless somebody is dying.”

And then, at the door, with his hand on the frame, he stopped and said the thing I would still be chewing on at midnight.

“The nurse you replaced got out while she still could,” he said, not turning around.

“Think about that.” Then he was gone, and his shoes went off down the corridor at a speed I wouldn’t have believed his lazy ass could produce.

I would like to say I gave it ten minutes.

But in truth, I gave it all of about ninety seconds.

Curiosity is the reason there is a paragraph about me in a police report in a state I no longer live in. Curiosity is a luxury item, and I have never been able to stop buying it on credit.

But as the girl under the veil, I had a rule, and that rule was that a locked drawer only gets heavier the longer you leave it shut.

So, I looked.

The cabinet was staff records. Not patients, not inmates.

Us.

Contracts and licensing and immunization histories, along with photocopied IDs of every person who had ever put on scrubs in that building. All of them sorted alphabetically and that in itself was such a strange thing to have your heart go sideways over. But as I went to the V’s, I had a feeling of what I would find… or more like, what I wouldn’t find.

VALDEZ. VANCE. VAUGHN…

And then… WALSH.

But no VALE.

I stood there with my fingers still in the gap, in an empty infirmary, in a building where nothing is allowed to go missing. I felt the floor do the thing floors do when they stop being reliable.

It’s misfiled. People misfile.

So I checked again. I checked the whole drawer, front to back, one folder at a time, with hands that were doing an admirable impression of steadiness. I checked the A’s in case somebody had filed me under Anna. I checked the drawer above and the drawer below. I checked the tray on top of the cabinet where the new hires go.

Anna Vale, agency contract, six days into a six-week placement, had no file at Ashlock State Penitentiary.

Every person in that building existed on paper except me.

And standing there with my fingers still in the gap, I worked out what that meant. A woman who is not in the filing cabinet is a woman nobody goes looking for. That’s when I did the second stupid thing.

I went to the medical files.

The ones on the far side of the room, the working charts for the men currently in the block. Not by name, because the one I was looking for didn’t have one. So, I looked by number, one I had shamefully memorized.