The wristband shouldn’t have been warm.
That was the first thing that didn’t sit right, and once it settled in, it refused to leave. I stood there in the empty hallway, the strip of plastic curled in my hand, my father’s name staring back at me like proof that I wasn’t losing my mind.
“He was here,” I whispered. “Recently.”
It was not long enough for everything to be scrubbed this clean.
I turned the band over in my fingers, my pulse was picking up again as the implication hit harder this time. If they removed him from this floor, they didn’t just erase the room. They must have erased the timeline.
I lifted my eyes slowly, scanning the hallway again, not for people this time, but for systems. For anything that still recorded what had happened before they wiped everything else.
Hospit
