Noah Woke Three Times Last Night

Noah woke three times last night. The sleep log said once. Serena recognized Eda's handwriting under the erased number. Eda spoke before any apology. "If it's marked as a gap, they take him away."

On the morning of the fifteenth day, the medical record desk still smelled of ink written overnight.

The physician checked the feeling in Noah's fingertips and opened the sleep log. Number of times waking: one. Time spent awake: ten minutes. Morning body temperature: normal. Going by those numbers alone, he'd slept deeply even after failing the test the day before.

But the creases in the bedsheet had been pressed down in three different directions.

Noah sat at the end of the bed, counting the three panes of the window.

"I woke up three times."

The physician looked up.

"Who kept track of the time?"

"The first was when the bell rang twice. The second was when Eda got up for water. The third was when light came in under the door."

That had been the light from Cassian and Serena fixing the hinge. Noah had pretended to fall back asleep then. He'd thought that people were doing night work again because of him, but he kept his eyes shut, afraid that if he got up his sleep record would look worse.

Serena held the log up to the light. The bottom curve of the "3" had been scraped away with a blade. A thin "1" had been written over it. "42 minutes" for time spent awake had also had its first digit erased and changed to "12 minutes."

The same handwriting. A habit of pressing twice on the right side of a short stroke. It was the stroke Eda used on application forms and medicine pickup sheets.

The physician snatched the log away.

"Who touched this?"

Cassian closed the door.

"Discard this log. We'll make a new one."

"If you throw away the original, the fact that it was altered disappears too." Serena said.

"And if the falsified record ends up in Octavia's hands?"

"If a hidden fact comes out later, it becomes stronger evidence against us."

The physician took out a red pencil.

"We need to find who altered it and cut off their access to medical records."

"First we seal the original. We give the person who made the change a separate chance to explain, and we divide up what gets disclosed and to whom."

"Does a reason give the numbers back?"

"No. That's exactly why we record both the reason and the responsibility."

Outside the door, medicine bottles clinked together. Eda stood there holding a tray. Today was the day of her administrative school application class, so she had a textbook tucked under her arm.

She looked once at the scraped-over spot on the log.

"You don't need a private room for this."

Cassian stood up.

"Eda."

"I altered it."

The physician's red pencil stopped moving. Noah folded down the finger he'd been counting the window panes with.

Eda set the medicine tray down beside the record desk. Each bottle had a schedule attached, along with the two discontinuation marks Noah had chosen. Her preparation was complete.

"The first time was four days ago. Noah woke five times but I wrote three. The second was yesterday. I changed three to one, and forty two minutes to twelve."

"Why?" Noah asked.

Eda couldn't look at him. She kept her eyes on the log.

"There's a continuous sleep clause in the guardianship gap assessment table. If a child wakes frequently at night and there's no fixed adult guardian, it can be recorded that intensive protection is unstable."

"So you made it look like I slept well?"

"Just the numbers."

Cassian said in a low voice.

"You don't even have the original text of that clause, so what did you base this on."

"I saw the attachment list in Aunt Octavia's letter. And there was a similar guardianship review table in the school's admission case files."

"You altered a medical record based on a guess?" the physician asked.

Eda's voice grew more formal.

"Yes. This was my own act. No other record keeper knew."

"Your access needs to be revoked."

"If I had access to revoke. I took on the recordkeeping without any qualification, just because I'm family."

The physician fell silent. Eda didn't use that opening to excuse herself.

"Even so, the numbers I changed got in the way of Noah's treatment. Yesterday, after the test, his fatigue looked smaller than it really was, and that could have affected decisions about medication dosage too."

Noah asked.

"If I sleep more, will they not take me?"

"That's not confirmed."

"But you wrote it that way anyway."

"Because I was scared."

Eda looked at Noah for the first time.

"I was scared that if I wrote that you couldn't sleep, it would be marked as a gap and they'd take you away. So I thought if I made the record look better, we could buy time."

"Why didn't you ask me?"

"I didn't want you to worry more."

"I already knew I woke up three times."

Noah's words came shorter now.

"You're the one who kept me from knowing."

Eda didn't ask for forgiveness right away. Her hand, which had been reaching to organize the medicine bottles, stopped.

"You're right."

Serena laid a black sheet of paper under the original to preserve the scraped marks more clearly. She placed the original between two transparent sheets. She didn't write the erased numbers back in.

"What's confirmed right now is that two dates were altered. We'll check the other dates separately. Eda's access to the records will be suspended temporarily, and the scope of what gets disclosed will be decided jointly by Noah and the person in charge of his medical care."

Cassian said.

"This was a mistake within the family."

"Just because it's within the family doesn't mean we can make a child's sleep less real."

"If we disclose this outside, we're handing Octavia a weapon against her own guardianship review."

Noah looked toward the door. Two people were waiting in the hallway for their appointments, and the door was half open.

"It's my sleep. Can I see it too?"

Serena didn't slide the plate toward Noah.

"You can. You can see all of it now, or just the numbers, or you can choose not to look today at all."

Noah counted the three options on his fingers.

"Today I just want to see the two altered lines."

The physician covered the original plate with a narrow paper window, leaving only two lines exposed. Noah stared for a long time at the scraped mark under the "3" and the "1."

"Is the three I told you the original?"

"The original record's three matches what you said." Serena said.

"What about the forty two minutes?"

Eda answered.

"I timed it until I came back from getting water, then added ten minutes for the last light. That was the number I wrote first."

"So you wrote it right the first time."

"And then I erased it."

Noah closed the transparent plate.

"I don't want to see any more today."

He left the room. Eda didn't follow him. Her hand, moving automatically to grab his coat, stopped in front of the coat rack.

The afternoon meeting had all four family members, the physician, Serena, and Rin the substitute record keeper. Eda brought her textbook but didn't open it.

The physician demanded a one month suspension of Eda's recordkeeping privileges. Cassian suggested that only the physician write the medical record from now on and that the family's own record be discarded. Rin pointed out that the physician couldn't be there every night.

"Whoever sees him wake up is family or the night shift. That person writes the first draft, and someone else confirms it in the morning."

"Who does the second confirmation?" Cassian asked.

"Someone in the same house with no conflicting stake." Rin said. "The night shift and the morning physician. If family writes it, the confirmer should not be family."

Eda put forward her own proposal.

"I'll give up sole recordkeeping authority for one month. I'll take training on sleep, medication, and temperature records, and for anything I witness myself, I'll only write the draft and not sign it."

"What about school?" Cassian asked.

"I'm not cancelling it. The training hours come out of my existing caregiving hours, and the substitute record keeper needs to be paid."

"You're fixing your own mistake, why should there be a wage."

Eda's voice turned cold.

"Regent Cassian Reeven. There was already a cost being saved by putting medical records in the hands of an unqualified sixteen year old. Don't merge the responsibility for my mistake with the responsibility for an unpaid structure."

Serena wrote two lines separately. Eda's falsification of the record. The absence of qualified night record staff. The first did not erase the second, and the second did not excuse the first.

Noah sat near the open door. Since he'd said he didn't want to hear all of it, Serena confirmed each decision briefly with him.

"We don't throw away the original. Do you agree?"

"Yes."

"We don't write new numbers over the erased ones. We cover them with a separate correction sheet instead."

"I want to see that."

"We record who changed what, when, and why."

Noah thought for a moment.

"Don't just write 'for my sake' as the reason."

Eda picked up the chalk.

"I'll write that I underreported the number and duration of wakings because I was afraid of the state's guardianship judgment."

"And that you didn't ask me."

"I'll write that I didn't inform Noah or ask for his consent."

The physician signed off on suspending Eda's sole recordkeeping rights. Rin wrote down the substitute record keeper's training and the night draft allowance. Cassian didn't pick up his pen for a while.

"This record itself could put Noah at risk."

Noah said.

"Getting caught in a lie is a risk too."

"This isn't something you should have to carry."

"I was already carrying my own sleep."

Cassian had nothing more to say. He marked the family's internal disclosure scope as an unresolved disagreement, but he signed off on preserving the original and on the second confirmer.

The correction sheet was made of thin paper that didn't cover the original. On the left was the original number, on the right the changed number, and below that were columns for who made the change, the time, the reason, the impact, and the second confirmer. It hung on a ring above the transparent plate without touching the original.

Eda wrote her own name as the first person to make a correction. Her handwriting was as neat as ever, but the last stroke ran long.

"Can I say I'm sorry?"

Noah didn't answer right away.

"You can say it. I'm not going to say I'm okay today."

"I understand."

"Who's going to tell me when to take my medicine today?"

Eda's hand moved toward the medicine bottles, then stopped.

"Rin will record it and the physician will confirm it. If you want, I can just tell you the time."

Noah looked at the medicine chart on the wall.

"I want Rin to do it today."

Eda nodded. Her face showed she'd lost something she used to be able to hold onto, but she didn't try to have that loss comforted by Noah.

After the meeting ended, she set the eraser down in the middle of the record desk. The corner she'd used to erase the original numbers had worn thin.

She laid the transparent correction sheet over it. The eraser was still visible, and so were the numbers.

Eda picked up her textbook and went to class. Noah didn't follow her. Between them, instead of forgiveness, what remained was a month long empty space in the record and the name of a second confirmer.