At 6:42, Claire found the wristband beneath the bed’s wheel.
It must have slipped off during the night wash. A strip of white plastic protruded from the brake, just enough to catch her eye as she bent to connect the pulse oximeter. She picked it up between two fingers. **NINA VALETTE**, seven years old, born March 7, 2019. The barcode was scratched through the middle, and the clasp no longer held.
In bed, Nina slept on her side, one hand above the blanket as though she had forgotten to tuck it in with the rest of her body. Her mother occupied the convertible chair by the window. All that showed was a bare foot and a mass of black hair spilling from the ward’s fleece blanket.
Claire put the wristband on the cart.
“I’ll make you another,” she murmured, though neither could hear her.
She liked the first minutes of handover, when the corridor still belonged to night-lights, machines, and people too underslept to want to talk. After seven, parents would ask for results, children for tablets, residents for files, the kitchen for trays, and every open door would produce a different urgency. For now, there was only the spaced beeping of room 312’s monitor and the brush of her soles on the polished floor.
Nina had undergone surgery for a perforated appendix two days earlier. Her fever had broken during the night. If she ate, drank, and walked a little, the team would begin talking about discharge. Claire read the handover notes without touching the tablet: she already knew them. Pain at four on getting up. Nausea after the eleven o’clock antibiotic. Tears at two, soothed by her mother. Nothing to justify waking a child for a piece of plastic.
At the nurses’ station, the wristband printer took three attempts to accept the roll. Claire opened it, removed a label stuck in the mechanism, and closed it.
“Are you ever going to speak nicely to it?” Samia asked behind her.
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