Vera arrived at that distant hospital, roughly ninety minutes from Ashgrove, as an unidentified patient with severe injuries and no accompanying information, admitted under a Jane Doe designation while hospital staff attempted, unsuccessfully given the specific circumstances, to identify her through the standard channels available at the time. Her severe facial swelling and injuries, combined with the amnesia that prevented her from providing any identifying information herself once she eventually regained consciousness, meant that even routine identification attempts — checking her against local missing persons reports — failed to connect her to the highway accident occurring, from the hospital's geographic perspective, in an entirely different jurisdiction that hadn't yet formally circulated a missing persons report given that local police believed, based on the burned vehicle, that they'd already recovered and identified the crash's sole occupant
Chapter Seven — Vera's Ten Years
Vera spent the following months, once her physical injuries had sufficiently healed, in the care of the state's social services system, her continued amnesia and the absence of any successful identification eventually resulting in her being connected with a foster-to-adult transitional housing program, given her apparent age in her mid-twenties placed her outside the standard child welfare system.
