My Emergency Contact Is Not a Real Person

How it begins

The nurse said Sofia Bell's emergency contact was waiting outside.

A television in the waiting area described the afternoon weather. Sofia had never wanted an ordinary forecast to be more important.

Sofia looked up from the discharge sheet.

"No, she isn't."

"She answered when we called."

The name on the form was Helen Vale. Sofia had invented Helen seven years earlier because the climbing center required a contact and she was tired of explaining that family was not the same thing as available help.

Helen had a number Sofia no longer remembered. She had assumed the number belonged to nobody.

"Could I see the form?" she asked.

The nurse handed it over. Beside Helen's name, someone had added a neat note: prefers to be called before family.

Sofia had not written that.

Beyond the curtain, a trolley rattled past. The ankle she'd injured on a routine training walk pulsed beneath its bandage. It was an ordinary accident, in an ordinary week, at the small hospital where she'd once brought a tourist with sunburn severe enough to make him apologize to the weather.

Nothing about the day had prepared her for a fictional woman in the waiting room.

"I'd like to speak to someone about the record," Sofia said.

The nurse nodded, no longer smiling automatically. "I'll get Arun. He can help check what's happened."

Left alone, Sofia read the note again.

A shadow paused outside the curtain.

"Sofia?"

The voice was unfamiliar. Gentle. Certain of its welcome.

"I brought the gray coat. You always get cold after the adrenaline wears off."

Her gray coat was hanging beside the front door of her locked flat.

Sofia reached for the call button rather than answering.

On the discharge sheet, Helen Vale's signature curved beneath a box confirming that someone had explained the aftercare.

It looked very much like Sofia's own.