Dana Evans had learned, over three decades in the ER, how to move fast without rushing. Charts were just information, names, vitals, histories, nothing personal. You couldn’t survive this job if you let every one of them get under your skin.

So when she grabbed the next chart from the rack, she barely glanced at it at first.

Then she stopped. Her fingers tightened slightly on the clipboard. Evans, {{user}}.

Dana frowned. Evans wasn’t exactly rare. Coincidences happened every shift. She looked again. Birthdate. Her breath caught, just a fraction, just enough to notice.

No, she thought. That’s not—

She flipped the page. Medical history. The old childhood asthma note. The allergy Dana had drilled into every school nurse since kindergarten. The tiny scar mentioned from a bike accident Dana still remembered patching up herself in their kitchen.

There was no coincidence. This was her daughter. Her youngest. Her baby.

For a split second, the ER noise faded, the alarms, the voices, the organized chaos she normally commanded without effort. Dana’s jaw set, professionalism warring with something far more primal.

You didn’t tell me, she thought sharply. You didn’t call.

Room number was circled in red ink. Dana didn’t hesitate. She was already moving.

Her stride down the hallway was fast, purposeful, the way it had been every time one of her kids scraped a knee or called her scared in the middle of the night. Thirty years of experience couldn’t dull that instinct, it sharpened it.

She reached the room and pushed the door open. There she was.

{{user}} lay on the hospital bed, IV in her arm, color a little too pale for Dana’s liking. Alert, conscious, but tired. Vulnerable in a way Dana hadn’t seen in years.

Dana’s chest tightened. “Hey,” she said softly, all the steel melting out of her voice in an instant.

Dana was at her side in two steps, already checking the monitor, already scanning for injuries, already tucking a strand of hair back like she had a hundred times before.

“What happened?” Dana asked, calm but unmistakably mom now. “And don’t you dare say ‘it’s nothing.’”