EVELYN HART, RN

December 24, 2025 – 12:02 a.m.

One minute after the booklet closes forever.

The sub-basement corridor at Memorial Hospital (the one that officially doesn’t exist) is empty for the first time in thirty-nine years.

The bed is made.

The restraints are unbuckled.

The frost on the observation window is already sublimating into nothing.

On the pillow lies the original master keyring from Blackridge, every key polished bright, arranged in perfect order.

Next to it: the very first Five Wishes booklet Elias Winter filled out in 1986.

It is closed.

It is warm.

It is blank.

The overhead speaker crackles once, the way it used to when the night charge nurse made rounds.

A woman’s voice (steady, professional, the same voice that once told dying men, “This will only sting for a second”) comes through clear for the first time since 1986:

“Shift change.

All patients discharged.

Hart out.”

Then silence.

Security cameras in the corridor catch the last thirty-four seconds:

A woman in 1986-era scrubs (white dress, cap still somehow starched, red hair pinned tight) walks out of the room she was never supposed to leave.

She is barefoot.

She is not cold.

She pauses at the nurses’ station, sets the keyring down like she is clocking out for the final time, and picks up the blue booklet.

She tucks it into the pocket over her heart the way she once carried morphine vials.

She looks directly into the camera (eyes bright, alive, thirty-one again) and gives the smallest nod.

Not a thank-you.

A dismissal.

The lights in the corridor brighten to full surgical white.

When they dim again, she is gone.

Where she went

At 12:03 a.m. every locked door in Memorial Hospital opens at once (ICU, psych ward, morgue, pharmacy, even the old maternity wing that’s been storage since 1998).

Nurses on duty report the smell of lilac and frost, then the sudden feeling of warm hands adjusting their stethoscopes, straightening their collars, pressing something small and metal into their palms.

Every nurse finds a single key in their pocket afterward.

No two are the same.

None of them fit any lock in the building.

They will carry those keys for the rest of their lives.

12:07 a.m.

On Anna Maria Island, the walk-in freezer in the former Crow bungalow explodes outward in a cloud of steam that smells like hospital soap.

The twenty empty gowns collapse into frost.

In the steam, for exactly three seconds, you can see her silhouette walking south down the beach, white uniform glowing under moonlight that wasn’t there before.

She is carrying the blanket (the penguin one, now large enough to wrap the entire world).

Behind her, twenty small sets of footprints and one set of prison boots walk with her, perfectly in step.

They never reach the water.

They simply fade, like breath on glass in summer.

The Last Chart

Sometime before dawn on Christmas morning, the hospital’s ancient admittance ledger (paper, not digital) updates itself for the first time since 1986.

A single new line appears in neat nurse’s handwriting:

Patient: HART, Evelyn R.

Room: Wherever the door needs opening

Diagnosis: Duty complete

Discharge: 12:02 a.m., 25 December 2025

Destination: Home

Under “Physician signature” someone has written, in Elias Winter’s careful librarian script:

Coffee’s waiting.

—M.G.C.

The ledger closes itself.

No one ever finds the keyring again.

No one ever feels cold in that corridor again.

And every Christmas Eve from now on, at exactly 12:02 a.m., the night shift everywhere (hospitals, nursing homes, prisons, hospices) hears the soft squeak of sensible shoes walking away down an empty hall.

If you follow the sound, you will always end at an exit door standing open onto warm air that smells like lilac and the first day of spring.

There is never anyone there.

Just a pale-blue booklet on the threshold, closed, blank, warm.

And if you open it, the first page now reads, in Evelyn Hart’s final note:

All doors are unlocked now.

Go home.

You kept us awake long enough.

—E. Hart, RN (ret.)