My phone buzzed in my scrub jacket pocket at 11:42 a.m., right in the middle of changing a dressing in room seven.

I almost let it go. I had three more patients waiting, a doctor who wanted vitals on the hour for the man in room nine, and my break wasn’t until two o’clock. Whoever it was could leave a message.

But it kept buzzing. And something in my chest made me look up.

“Mrs. Alvarez,” I said to the woman in the bed, “I’ll be right back. Don’t touch that.”

She held up both hands. “Wouldn’t dream of it, honey.”

I stepped out into the hallway and pulled out the phone.

Unknown number.

I almost didn’t answer. I never answer unknown numbers. They’re always somebody trying to sell me an extended warranty on a car I bought used.

I answered anyway.

“Hello?”

“Ma’am? This is Officer Benny Reyes. I’m calling about your boys.”

Every bit of air left my body.

“Your children are safe,” he said quickly. “I want you to hear that first. But I need you to come home. Your older son was involved in a situation, and I’d rather explain it in person.”

I pressed my back flat against the hallway wall. A cart rattled past me. Somebody was paging respiratory over the speaker.

“Are my children okay? What happened? Is Logan hurt?”

“There’s no immediate danger,” he said. “But it’s important you come home as soon as you can.”

“Officer, please, just tell me—”

The call ended.

I stared at the screen. Call ended. 0:38.

Thirty-eight seconds. That’s all it took.

I don’t remember walking to the nurses’ station. I just remember being there, holding onto the edge of the counter, and Denise, my charge nurse, looking up at me over her glasses.

“Rachel? You’re white as a sheet.”

“Family emergency. I have to go. Room seven needs her dressing finished and nine needs vitals at noon.”

“Go,” Denise said. She was already standing up. “I’ve got it. Go.”

I left in the middle of my shift. I didn’t change. I didn’t clock out. I still had my hospital badge clipped to my chest and a pen behind my ear and a roll of tape in my pocket.

I drove through two red lights on the way home.

I didn’t even really see them. I just remember a horn blaring somewhere behind me and realizing, a block later, what I’d done.

The drive was twenty minutes long.

And I spent every single one of them imagining the worst.

My name is Rachel. I’m forty-one years old. I’ve been a nurse for nineteen years.