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I got poor Mrs. Stewart through her procedure, then rewarded her with a FaceTime call to Fluffy, who barked so happily when he saw his owner that it made me all warm and fuzzy inside.

I made a mental note to find out whether there was any way to get the elderly lady a visit with her doggy. There must be some way around the ward rules, which didn’t allow animals except for guide dogs. I pulled out my notebook to scribble “find out the definition of an emotional support animal.”

If anyone ever found any of my notebooks they’d no doubt wonder what on earth I was talking about. Or whether they should call the police, in the case of my revenge diary.

Leaving Mrs. Stewart’s bay, I crossed the ward to the new lady at the end of the room—​the last bay on the left. “Good afternoon, Ms. MacDonald. I’m Nisa, the nurse in charge.”

Ms. MacDonald drew her eyes away from the window across the room, which looked out onto the field at the back of the cottage hospital—​currently whited out with snow, with little contrast to the white sky above it, save the punctuation of the bare trees separating the two at the horizon. She blinked her dark brown eyes, as if attempting to register what I was saying.

I gave her a warm and encouraging smile in response.

She smiled hesitantly, lifting a hand to tuck a strand of gray hair behind her ear. “Hello. I was just looking out to see if my dad was bringing my horse, Thunder, back in from the field. He doesn’t much like the cold.”

I came around the side of the bed and drew up a chair next to the older lady. She was only sixty-​six, as I remembered from the information at the handover. But the dementia had already robbed her of so much. That thought prickled my heart with sadness. “Is that Thunder or your dad who doesn’t much like the cold, Ms. MacDonald?” I asked.

She laughed, a soft ringing sound that warmed my insides. It sounded like rain tinkling on a roof when you are cozy indoors. Very unlike my own loud peal, which pierced everyone’s eardrums.

“Well now, I rather think neither of them enjoys it very much,” my patient commented, her features relaxing. “And please, call me Anna. Ms. MacDonald makes me think of my mother.”

I nodded. “Anna. And does your mother dislike the cold?”

Anna frowned. “That I’m not sure of. She died when I was very little.”

I touched her hand briefly, sorrow swelling in my chest. “Oh, I am sorry.”

“No need to apologize. You weren’t to know, and it was a long time ago.” Anna smiled again, and I noted that she had a lovely smile. It made her dark brown eyes shine like tempered chocolate.

“Is there anything I can do to help this afternoon or make you more comfortable?” I asked.

Anna looked around her, a small furrow between her brows. “I can’t remember when my dad is coming to collect me.”

The sharp sting of sorrow twisted in my chest. No matter how many times I had these kinds of encounters, they always raked my soul.

I gently took Anna’s hand. “Listen. I’m a nurse, and this is the Inverglen Community Hospital. You’ve been poorly, but you’re getting better and you’re safe here. We’re just making sure everything is stable before you can be discharged.”

All of that was true, so I wasn’t colluding with Anna’s clouded version of reality; but it also wasn’t so explicit with detail as to cause distress. I knew from experience that didn’t help, because information couldn’t be retained long enough, so the person would just end up being re-traumatized every time they had the same information imparted to them.

Anna’s face relaxed again. “Thank you.”

I squeezed her hand, vowing to come back later to check on Anna again and perhaps find out a little more about her, depending on what she could recall.

*

After my shift was done, I headed out of the hospital toward my car, walking gingerly on the very shiny, icy black tarmac. No way did I want to take a header right outside my place of work and end up an inpatient myself.

My phone buzzed in my pocket and a glance at my watch confirmed it was Mum again, surely wanting to ask when I was coming to look at this bloody email. I paused to dictate a reply via my watch. “I’ll FaceTime you when I get home.”

Before I had left, I’d checked on Anna. The elderly lady had not remembered me from our chat earlier in the day but had appeared to find me familiar and seemed at ease in my company. That pleased me. I hated to think of any of my patients feeling frightened on my ward.

I had managed to get Anna talking about her childhood and discovered that she grew up in Glasgow and was an only child. Her father brought her up after her mother died at a young age.

The background in Anna’s case notes was that she had been found wandering on the outskirts of Auchness, the next village over from Inverglen, unable to remember where she lived or what her name was. She had been taken to the nearest emergency department in Inverness, which was about thirty-​five miles away. There she had been found to have a chest infection causing sepsis and delirium. She had been gravely unwell and in need of intravenous antibiotics. After a stay on the high-dependency ward, she improved physically but her memory was still poor—​she was able to remember her name but spoke as if she was still an adolescent living with her dad on the outskirts of Glasgow. She had been allocated a social worker, but it was a mystery where her current home was.

I, like the clinicians who had looked after her thus far, had surmised that Anna had a dementia syndrome, then had become unwell with a chest infection, became more acutely confused, and went out wandering, unable to remember where she was or how to get home. And even though she had improved, it could take many months before the effects of a delirium returned to baseline, if at all. Plus, we didn’t even know what Anna’s baseline was.

I pulled up outside the garden center, then hurried inside through the chilly evening air like a woman on a mission. I knew exactly what I was aiming to buy.

A few rows into the shelves of Christmas decorations, I spotted it. The very same reindeer set that Kerr had on his front lawn. If he could copy my lights, I would copy his reindeer. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, saboteur! And he didn’t have an inflatable Santa or an LED tree, so I was bound to outdo him now.