Kayla always picked one.
And everybody laughed.
Because if you were laughing, you weren’t the one being laughed at.
So Dana laughed.
And then she looked down at her charting screen and felt sick.
Three weeks earlier, Elise Maddox had still been a nurse.
Lieutenant Elise Maddox. Navy Nurse Corps. At least, that’s what her badge said. That’s what everybody thought.
She’d arrived at Portsmouth eleven months earlier. Transferred in from somewhere nobody knew. She didn’t say where. When people asked, she said, Overseas. When they asked where overseas, she said, Here and there.
She was thirty-eight. Older than most of the junior nurses. Brown hair, usually in a messy bun with a pencil stuck through it. No makeup. Tired eyes. A thin white scar that ran from her left ear down along her jaw. You only saw it when she turned her head a certain way.
She was quiet.
