“Sarah…” she couldn’t finish the sentence.
“Your daughter was found in the park,” he said, looking at a crack in the wall instead of her. “She needs medical attention. She’s at Mercy Hospital. You need to come with me.”
The world tilted. The officer’s words sounded like they were coming through a thick layer of cotton. Found? In the park? What kind of help? Only one thought pounded in her head: *She’s alive. She’s alive.* She grabbed the first thing she saw—an old raincoat—and shoved her feet into shoes, not even noticing she was barefoot.
The hospital smelled of bleach and antiseptic. The long, dimly lit hallway with its institutional green walls seemed endless. The squeak of her own shoes on the linoleum was deafening. She was led to a small office where a tired, gray-haired doctor sat behind a desk piled with charts. He looked up with bloodshot eyes.
“Please, sit down,” he said with a heavy sigh. “Your daughter’s condition is serious. She has a closed head injury and multiple contusions. We’re worried about internal bleeding. We’re doing everything we can. But…”
Ellen didn’t hear the medical terms. She clung to his words like a drowning woman to a straw.
“Will she live? Doctor, please, tell me she’s going to live.”
“It’s too early for certainties,” he said evasively. “The next few hours are critical. You can see her. But… prepare yourself.”
Ellen understood what “prepare yourself” meant the moment she stepped into the room. On the metal bed, under a thin hospital blanket, lay something small and motionless. For a second, Ellen thought the doctor had made a mistake. This couldn’t be her daughter. The person on that bed had nothing in common with her radiant, beautiful Sarah.
Instead of the face she loved, there was a swollen, purple mask of bruises. Her lips were split. Her blonde hair, which Ellen had brushed so lovingly that morning, was matted with dirt and something dark. On a chair by the bed lay a pathetic, dirty pile of fabric. Ellen didn’t recognize it at first. Then she did. The ivory graduation dress. Or what was left of it. Torn to shreds, stained with mud.
Ellen walked slowly to the bed. Her legs barely held her. She reached out a trembling hand and touched her daughter’s shoulder. The skin was cold. Then the most terrifying thing happened. Sarah’s eyes, which had been staring blankly at the ceiling, slowly turned toward her mother. But there was no recognition. No pain, no fear, no plea. Only a bottomless, dead vacancy. The look of a broken doll. The look of someone whose soul had been stolen.
Ellen’s knees gave out. She collapsed onto the cold tile floor by the bed. A sound escaped her—not a scream, but a low, guttural moan, the sound a living thing makes when the pain is too much to bear. She had no tears. The shock had burned them away, leaving only a scorched, empty desert inside.
Ellen didn’t remember leaving the room, or what she said to the doctor, or the nurse giving her a sedative that made the world go blurry. But the pain didn’t leave; it just became heavy and dull. She spent the rest of the night on a hard bench in the hallway, staring at a crack in the wall, listening to every sound from behind the door. She didn’t sleep. Sleep felt like a betrayal of the girl lying in that silent hell.
When the first gray light of dawn filtered through the hospital windows, something clicked inside Ellen. The mechanism of despair was replaced by something else: the need for action. The grief was still there, but it had compressed into a hard, cold ball in her chest. She stood up, smoothed her wrinkled coat, and walked out of the hospital without saying a word. The morning air was fresh, the city was waking up, buses were starting their routes. This ordinary, peaceful world felt like a grotesque insult to what she had just seen.
The local police station was a drab two-story building with peeling yellow paint and bars on the windows. Inside, it smelled of stale coffee and old paper. Ellen walked up to the front desk. A sleepy sergeant was leaning back in his chair, reading a newspaper. He looked up with glazed eyes.
“I need to file a report,” Ellen said. Her voice was raspy and dead, sounding like a stranger’s. “My daughter…”
She was sent to the second floor, to a hallway of identical brown doors. Office 7. Detective Miller. She knocked. A young man in his mid-twenties opened the door. He hadn’t yet lost the softness in his face. His eyes, unlike the sergeant’s downstairs, were clear. Seeing the woman’s exhausted, gray face, he immediately turned serious.
“Come in, please. Sit down. What happened?”
Ellen sat on the hard visitor’s chair. Her gaze drifted over the office: stacks of files, an old typewriter on the desk. Mechanically, word by word, she began to tell the story. Graduation, the waiting, the call, the hospital. Her voice didn’t shake. There were no tears. It was flat and hollow, which made the story even more horrific.
Detective Miller listened intently. He took notes in a neat, careful hand. When she finished, he poured her a glass of water from a pitcher.
“Was your daughter able to say anything? Names?” he asked softly.
Ellen shook her head.
“She isn’t talking. She just stares.”
“I see,” Miller nodded. “Mrs. Miller, I am so sorry. We will do everything we can. We’ll open a case, talk to witnesses, classmates. We’ll find who did this.”
There was sincerity in his voice. For a moment, a tiny shadow of hope flickered in Ellen’s heart. Maybe this was the man who would help. An honest cop who would do his job.
At that moment, the door swung open without a knock. A heavy-set man, Captain Reed, stepped in. He looked at Ellen with a cold, calculating gaze.
“What have you got here, Miller?”
“A report, Captain. Assault on a young woman. She’s in critical condition. A graduate,” Miller reported briefly.
The Captain grunted.
“A graduate? Right.”
Before he could say more, another man appeared behind him. Tall, fit, in a perfectly pressed Colonel’s uniform. Ellen recognized his face from the local papers. It was Sterling. The Police Commissioner. Ian Sterling’s father.
The Commissioner walked into the small office, and the room seemed to shrink. The air became heavy. He didn’t even look at Ellen. His entire focus was on Miller’s desk.
“The file,” he said, his voice short and commanding.
Miller, turning pale, handed over his notes. Sterling skimmed them, his lips curling into a sneer. Then he slowly raised his cold, steel-gray eyes to Ellen. It was the look of a man looking at a nuisance.
“Assault, then?” he said quietly, but every word felt like a threat. “Graduation night, beer flowing. Look into it, Miller.” He turned to the detective, completely ignoring Ellen. “Most likely the girl went looking for trouble and now she’s playing the victim. You know how these things go with girls like that.”
He didn’t need to finish. Everything had been said. The hope that had just flickered in Ellen’s soul died, crushed by that calm, powerful voice. She looked at Commissioner Sterling and saw more than just the father of a monster. She saw the whole system. A massive, impenetrable wall that her grief and her truth would shatter against.
Sterling tossed the file back on the desk and walked out. Captain Reed followed him, giving Miller a warning look. The door slammed shut. A heavy silence filled the room. Detective Miller sat with his head down, unable to look at Ellen. He was ashamed—of his helplessness, of his uniform, of everything he’d been taught.
Ellen stood up slowly. She understood. Everything.
“Thank you,” she said quietly…
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