I did not know. There was no plan. I had read something once, years ago, in a waiting room, on a poster — the kind you read because you are bored — and the phrase that came back to me at that desk, whole, was that you can ask to be seen alone.
That is all it was. A poster I had not thought about in six years.
The woman who came and got me was called Rowan Byrd. She is a social worker attached to that emergency department and she was on the night shift, which she told me later she had swapped into that week as a favour.
I was in a room with her for twelve minutes before anybody looked at my ribs.
She did four things and I am going to list them, because I have since learned that most people have no idea any of it exists.
She asked me what had happened and wrote down my answer in my own words, in quotation marks.
She photographed the marks on my face and arm against a ruler, dated, with my consent, on hospital equipment, into a hospital record.
She asked whether I had somewhere to go tonight and did not react at all when I said I didn’t know.
And she gave me a card with a number on it and said, without any pressure whatsoever, that the record now existed whether I ever used it or not, and that it would still exist in five years if I changed my mind.
Twelve minutes.
That twelve minutes is the reason the next eighteen months went the way they went, and I did not understand that for months.
Because here is what happened three weeks later, entirely predictably.
Verna Strand told everybody I had fallen.
She told the family. She told two of my friends, one of whom believed her. She told her lawyer, and then in due course she told an investigator, and her account was consistent, calm, and delivered by a well-dressed sixty-two-year-old woman with no record of anything.
