The Courtesy Call

Every call is polite. Every call is helpful. And every patient dies within the window they give her.Hospital social worker Neva Strand is used to bad news. What she isn't used to is Clinical Resource Coordination - an administrative department that contacts her before certain patients are expected to "transition."The language is always the same. The time windows are disturbingly precise.Then Neva realizes something else.She can't find the department in the hospital directory.She starts keeping a private record. Four calls. Four patients. Four deaths.What begins as pattern recognition becomes a question Mercy Regional does not want her asking. Somewhere inside the hospital, patients are being identified by a process no one will explain, and the people around Neva have learned that asking too much can become a compliance problem of its own.An ICU nurse has been carrying the same secret for years. A hospital administrator knows more than he admits. And another patient's name is moving toward the same invisible threshold.Neva has spent eight years helping people navigate systems built to care for them.Now she has to find out what happens when the system itself has made the decision.