the nurses’ station in Charlotte, North Carolina, with the smell of antiseptic in my hair and old coffee burning in the pot behind me. The heart monitor from Room 12 blinked green against the glass wall. Somewhere down the hall, a ventilator sighed in a steady rhythm.
I read my father’s message once.
Then again.
Then a third time, because exhaustion can make you misread things, and after fourteen years as a registered nurse, I knew better than to trust the first version of anything at 3:00 a.m.
But the words stayed the same.
My name is Arden Voss. I was thirty-six years old, single, tired in my bones, and the sole owner of a small lake house on Lake Norman that I bought after nine years of double shifts, packed lunches, clearance-rack scrubs, and driving a dented silver Honda Civic everyone in my family loved to mock.
The house was mine.
