Nurse Judith had a system.
It was not the hospital's system, exactly — it was hers, refined over eleven years of discharge processing, built from the particular frustration of watching paperwork get lost, details get skipped, and patients walk out of doors without anyone having properly confirmed who they were or where they were going. She had a clipboard. She had a pen she did not lend to anyone. She had a sequence of questions she asked in the same order every time, and she did not move to the next one until she had a satisfactory answer to the one before it.
She pulled the chair to the side of the bed at nine in the morning and opened the folder on her clipboard.
Jay was already dressed.
