Chapter 8: Husband Notified

I drove to the hospital the morning after the funeral.

It was the same emergency room where I had sat on a paper-covered bed five months ago while a nurse asked me who I could call.

I had given her Tommaso's number.

He hadn't answered it for two hours.

At the records window, a clerk slid a form across the counter.

"Patient or representative?"

"Patient. Elisa Sartori." I laid my license beside the form. "I want everything from that night. The notes, the labs, all of it."

"Complete file or the summary?"

"What's the difference?"

"The summary is two pages." She looked at the screen. "The complete file is twenty-six."

"Twenty-six."

She printed it, and it was warm when she handed it over.

I carried it to a row of plastic chairs and sat down.

Page one was my name and my date of birth.

By page nine, I had stopped reading words and started reading numbers.

At the bottom of the blood panel, there was a line in bold type.

Sedative detected, a prescription hypnotic. Patient denies taking any medication.

I read it three times.

"I always thought it was the drink," I said out loud.

Nobody was near me to hear.

Next to the lab results, in the margin, the doctor had written a note by hand.

Suspected drug-facilitated incident. Patient unsteady, oriented but amnesic for the last six hours. Advised patient to report. Husband notified.

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