It had been to cut off her money.

She did not call the police that morning, and every person she told this story to afterward asked her why, and she developed a stock answer that was true but incomplete: I had no phone, no ID, a false name at a clinic, twenty-two dollars, and a story about a hospital insider that I couldn’t prove, and I was going to be describing my own husband and mother-in-law and a woman I could not name.

The complete answer was worse and simpler.

The woman had said there’s someone on that floor. Maya did not know who.