I had found her.
I had called for help.
I should have gone home.
But I couldn’t.
Something inside me wouldn’t let me leave that woman alone for a second time.
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So I followed the ambulance to the hospital.
I sat in the waiting room with rainwater dripping from my hair and mud drying on my shoes, unable to stop shaking.
Every time a doctor or nurse walked past, I stood up and asked if she was alive.
Eventually, a nurse came over to me.
“She’s stable for now,” she said. “But she was dangerously hypothermic and severely dehydrated.”
I let out a breath, but the nurse didn’t look like she was finished.
“There’s something else,” she said quietly.
My stomach tightened.
“What?”
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.
