She lowered her voice.
“It appears she was sedated.”
The hallway seemed to tilt around me.
“Sedated?”
“We don’t know with what yet,” she said. “But she wasn’t simply asleep.”
That word changed everything.
Sedated meant someone might have given her something.
Someone might have made her helpless.
Someone might have placed her in that wheelchair and left her somewhere they believed no one would find her.
Not long afterward, the police arrived.
They asked me about everything.
Where I had seen the wheelchair.
What condition she had been in.
Whether another car had been nearby.
Whether I had seen anyone driving away.
I tried to remember, but my head was full of rain, headlights, and the image of her thin hand hanging from the armrest.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I only saw her.”
One of the officers nodded quietly.
“You may have saved her life.”
But I didn’t feel like a hero.
I felt sick.
Because saving someone does not erase the cruelty of what was done to them.
Near dawn, a doctor finally came into the hallway.
“She’s awake,” he said.
I stood up so quickly that my chair scraped across the floor.
“Can she talk?”
“A little,” he replied. “She’s weak, but conscious.”
I followed him down the hallway and stopped in the doorway of her room.
She was lying beneath warm blankets now, smaller than she had seemed in the wheelchair.
Her face was still pale, but she no longer looked dead.
A nurse stood beside her, holding her hand.
An officer waited nearby with a notebook.
The nurse leaned closer and said gently:
