I clicked the scanner onto the workstation. “I don’t think so.”

But it was too late. I watched recognition spread across her face.

“Oh, my God.” Her smile widened with cruel delight. “It’s YOU. Library Lena.”

Just like that, I was 16 again, standing in the cafeteria, staring at the lunch she had just knocked out of my hands while her friends laughed.

And that smile told me she hadn’t changed at all. She wasn’t going to let this go.

I didn’t respond. I just held out her medication cup. “These are your morning meds.”

She took them without breaking eye contact. “So, you became a nurse, huh? Strange… you spent all that time in books. Why not a doctor? Couldn’t afford med school, Lena?”

I hated how she could still find the truth after all these years and strike at it with just a few words.

“What about your personal life?” she continued, studying my hands. “Husband, kids?”

Another question I didn’t want to answer, but I had to say something.

“I have three kids,” I replied. I wasn’t about to tell her I was raising them alone after my husband left me for a younger colleague the previous year. “What about you?”

“I have a daughter. I feel that having more than one child divides attention too much. Makes it harder to be a really good parent.”

She smiled.

I wanted to throw my clipboard at her, but instead I smiled back and left as quickly as I could.

After that, it became a game for her.

Small comments. Tiny cuts.

When I adjusted her pillow, she said, “Can you not tug like that?” even though I barely touched it.

When I flushed her IV, she flinched before I even connected the syringe and sighed as if I were being rough on purpose.

If anyone else was in the room, she turned sweet instantly.

Then the door would close, and she’d look at me with that same lazy cruelty.

And I started to realize—it wasn’t random. She was building toward something.

One afternoon, a CNA named Marcus came in to check her blood sugar.

As soon as he left, she looked me over and said, “That scrub color really washes you out.”

I kept charting. “Do you need anything else?”