Then, on a Tuesday in February, the green Honda didn’t come.

It was snowing hard, the wet, heavy kind that snaps power lines. Bangor schools had announced a two-hour delay, so I figured that was it. He’d be sleeping in like every other kid in Penobscot County.

But the Corolla came, right on time.

That’s when the nurse rolled down her window and looked past me at the empty lot.

“Where’s my boy?”

He didn’t come Wednesday, or Thursday.

On Thursday, Kurt actually smiled. “Problem solved,” he said, tapping his stopwatch app. “Our average service time dropped eleven seconds.”

I didn’t answer him. I was watching the road.

On Friday, the nurse came through the line looking like she hadn’t slept in three days. Her hair was pulled back in a messy knot, and there were dark smudges under her eyes. Her hospital badge was clipped on crooked. For the first time, I could read the name on it: JOANNE PELLETIER, RN, CRITICAL CARE.

“Still no?” she asked.

I shook my head.

She gripped the steering wheel with both hands.

“I keep thinking something’s wrong,” she said. “I know that’s stupid. I don’t even know who he is. But I lie awake at night thinking about it.”

Then she hesitated, and her voice dropped.

“We had a kid come into the ICU Monday night. Car accident on Route 9, near the Hermon line. Black ice. Seventeen years old. He’s still not awake.”

She swallowed hard.

“I’m not on his case. I work the other unit, the cardiac side. I’ve only seen him through the glass when I walk past.”

“What did he look like?” I asked. My own voice sounded far away.

“Skinny. Brown hair.” She closed her eyes. “His things came in with him in a plastic bag. Patient belongings. They hang them on a hook outside the room. There was a gray hoodie in it.”

I felt my stomach drop right through the floor of that little red shed.

I pulled out my phone with my fingers shaking and scrolled back through my photos, past my granddaughter’s dance recital and a picture of a moose that wandered into the Irving lot. I found the birthday photo: the boy, the cupcake, the gray hoodie.

I turned the screen toward her.

She leaned halfway out of her car window in the snow to look.

Then she put her hand over her mouth.

“That’s him,” she whispered. “That’s the boy in bed four.”

Then she looked at the photo again, closer this time, and said something that made me grab the counter.

“Wait,” she said. “I know that face. I’ve seen it before.