Chapter 11

When Meredith pulls her car into the hospital’s parking lot, she is confounded by the number of vehicles she sees there. Usually, there are, on average, about thirty vehicles in the parking lot, patients’ included. But now, her eyes flit around in quick calculation, and she sees that there are at least sixty vehicles, and every single space in the lot is taken. 

There seems to be an awful lot of clientele today, and she sighs tiredly just thinking about it. She drives out to visit the nearest public parking lot and leaves her car before hurriedly walking back to the hospital.

It is when she enters inside that she understands what is happening. Double the number of nurses move about, and most of them have faces she’s never seen before. They all wear white scrubs but with a red and green badge sewn onto the breast pocket. Two men in light brown scrubs who she’d never seen before, one tall and the other short, with stethoscopes hanging off their necks, leisurely walk p