She did not know whether it was a nurse or a clerk or a supervisor, and she did not know what other systems that person touched, and she had spent eleven days as a patient in a building where she had watched, every single day, how much information moved sideways between people in scrubs.

She could not risk becoming a name in a system until she understood the shape of what she was inside.

She did not call her old coworkers for the same reason.

She had worked at a hospital-adjacent pharmacy.

She did not know where the edges were.

So she sat in the terminal at eleven in the morning on a Friday, drinking a dollar coffee, and picked up a newspaper somebody had left on the seat, because she needed something to hold.

It was three days old.