“You need to call him,” Marcus said.

“Put it on speaker.”

I checked my watch.

It was seventeen hundred hours.

“I need to see my daughter first,” I said.

The pediatric wing at Chesapeake General Hospital smelled of floor wax and rubbing alcohol.

Hard plastic chairs lined the walls of the main waiting room.

I sat in a blue chair near the double doors that led back to the intensive care unit.