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Chapter 4: THE HOSPITAL
publish date:
2026-08-31 13:55:07
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2:17 A.M. Chapter 9 : THE THIRD CALL
It wasn't long before Daniel called, his voice carrying a tension she wasn't used to hearing from him."Where did you get this photo?" he asked directly, no preamble.Eliana explained how she'd found it through an old local forum, and how she'd noticed the fragment of the name visible on the building behind the children."Ravencroft," Daniel repeated the name quietly, as if trying it out on his tongue for the first time. "I've never heard that name before, but I'll start looking into it right away. Send me the photo in the highest quality you have."After the call ended, Eliana sat in her apartment, the photo still open on her screen, her eyes drifting back again and again to that small girl at the edge of the frame. She tried to occupy herself with something else, but something about that photo refused to leave her mind.The rest of the evening passed relatively quietly, interrupted only by a short message from Daniel telling her he'd found no official record of the name "Ravencroft"
2:17 A.M. Chapter 8 : THE OLD PHOTOGRAPH
The following days passed at a relatively slower pace — not because the danger had receded, but because the investigation had entered a quieter phase: careful, patient searching, far from the sudden escalation that had marked the first few days.Daniel tried to get official access to Claire Morgan's disappearance file, but ran into a small, irritating obstacle: the case wasn't under his direct jurisdiction, and any formal request to view it would raise questions he wasn't ready to answer yet — especially since he couldn't justify his interest without revealing the details of Eliana's calls to his superiors."This is going to take longer than I expected," he told her over the phone on the fourth day. "I can't just request the file without a solid reason. I'll try a different angle."Rather than wait passively, Eliana decided to dig on her own, drawing on the research skills she'd built as a student used to digging through archives and open sources for academic work. She sat at her comp
2:17 A.M. Chapter 7 : THE SECOND NAME
That day passed with a strange heaviness, as if the hours moved slower than usual whenever Eliana watched them, and faster than they should whenever she tried to occupy herself with anything else.She tried working on her university project for a while, but found herself staring at the empty screen without writing a single word, her mind entirely stuck on one name: Robert Kane — a man she didn't know, had never seen in her life, but toward whom she now carried a strange sense of responsibility, as if knowing in advance what might happen to him made her part of his story somehow.At four in the afternoon, a text from Daniel broke the silence.*Found him. Third one on the list — 54, works finance at a real estate firm downtown, alone most evenings closing out the books. Heading there now.*She read it twice, some of the weight in her chest easing slightly for the first time all day. He'd made it in time. Whatever came next, at least it wouldn't be for lack of trying.At six in the eveni
2:17 A.M. Chapter 6 : DETECTIVE DANIEL HAYES
The call ended around a quarter to three in the morning, after Daniel had listened to every detail Eliana relayed without any real interruption, sticking to short, direct questions every now and then. Before ending the call, he asked her to come to the station in the morning, as soon as she woke up, bringing the recording and the phone she'd saved the old messages on.Eliana didn't sleep after that. She stayed lying in the dark, watching her ceiling until the first threads of light began slipping in behind the curtains, then finally got up without feeling any real exhaustion, as if the tension itself had replaced her need for sleep.She arrived at the station at nine in the morning, carrying her old phone and laptop in her bag. The building looked nothing like the image she'd pictured in her head the night before, while rehearsing a confession she'd ultimately never spoken — no harsh neon lights, just ordinary desks cluttered with paper, intermittent phone noise, and the smell of bad
2:17 A.M. Chapter 5 : UNKNOWN NUMBER, AGAIN
Eliana spent the rest of that day in a state of quiet dread, drifting between small tasks that carried no real meaning — straightening the pages of her university project without writing a single word, preparing food she never finished eating, rereading Daniel Hayes's card more than once, as if the printed letters might change if she stared at them long enough.As evening came, she tried to convince herself that a day this relatively quiet, free of any new call or message, might mean it was over. Maybe last night and the attack on Marcus Reed had been a single, isolated event, however terrifying and unsettlingly timed. Maybe it wouldn't happen again.She didn't believe this even as she formed the thought in her head, but she needed it in order to get some sleep.Before she lay down, she dug an old phone out of the bottom drawer of her desk — a cracked, half-dead thing she'd meant to recycle months ago and never had. She charged it just enough to turn on, found the voice recorder app s
2:17 A.M. Chapter 4: THE HOSPITAL
The moment Eliana walked in, she hit a wall of muffled noise, nothing like the artificial calm she'd expected from a hospital lobby at this hour of the day. There was unusual movement everywhere: men in uniform standing near the main elevator, talking low into radios, nurses moving faster than usual, and a handful of people with cameras and microphones trying, uselessly, to push past a temporary barrier security had set up at the entrance to one of the wards.She stood for a moment in the middle of the lobby, trying to look like she knew where she was going, her eyes scanning the signs hanging over the different corridors, searching for anything that might point her toward the wing Marcus Reed was likely in.She approached the reception desk, where an employee sat looking already worn down by the sheer number of questions she'd fielded that morning."Excuse me," Eliana said, trying to keep her voice steady. "I'm looking for Mr. Marcus Reed's room."The employee looked up at her with v
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