Claudia followed the social worker out of the emergency room. They took the quickest route, braving the gauntlet of wheelchairs and gurneys and beeping, hissing machines, where the challenge for Claudia was finding someplace safe to look. Her eyes were drawn to the tableaux happening on the other side of the dividing curtains—the moaners, the bleeders, the hopelessly bored—and she struggled to keep her attention on the backs of the social worker’s shoes. They walked briskly along, past the buzzing hive of the nurses’ station, past radiology, through one set of automatic doors after another, until they came to a lounge at the end of a long, antiseptic hall. The room was stifling, filled with pressed-wood furniture and the milky-gray light that seeped between crooked blind slats. Crumpled, mostly coverless magazines littered a scuffed coffee table, and the smell of institutional gravy, wafting in from a nearby food cart, clotted the air. The social worker, whose name tag read “Valerie Emerson, CSW,”
