“How long has she been on the floor?” Low voice. Unhurried. The kind of voice that makes the ambient noise organize itself around it.
“A while now.” I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining—if he tells anyone that I’m being difficult, we’ll never get seen. So, I smile as politely as I can manage. “They said the doctor would be right with us. I’m sure it won’t be long.”
He looks back at me. His eyes are dark, attentive. No sympathy there. Just observation.
“Are you the new doctor?” I ask.
Something moves behind his expression. A two-second calculation I can see but can’t read. He reminds me of a boy I knew in college, Aaron. Too smart to be in a remedial math class with me, but he took it for an easy A. He was always calculating, always thinking. He was a little weird, but I felt oddly safe with Aaron.
He was incredibly straightforward with me, almost like he didn’t know how to lie. There was no subterfuge with Aaron, not ever. One time, he told me he could see my bra through the button gap in my shirt. If any other guy had told me that, I would have thought he was being gross or trying to flirt. Coming from Aaron, though, it was a warning, in case I didn’t want to flash anyone. I thanked him, fixed my shirt, and it never came up again.
The man meets my gaze. “I’m the new doctor. Would you like me to examine her?”
“Please. If you have the time.”
He sets the box down against the wall and crouches to our level, and I feel the evening reorganize itself around that single motion. Thank God.
TWO
DARIO
I’m in hell.
Fifteen minutes. That was all it was supposed to be. I needed the lidocaine, the irrigation syringes, and the suture kit that Hale promised to pull for me six days ago and apparently stopped thinking about the moment I left the building.
We’ll have to have a talk before I go.
The supply closet at the Archer Street free clinic is organized by someone with a strong opinion about categories and no discernible logic within them. I spent eight minutes finding what I came for, which is longer than it should have taken.
I had the box. I was done. I was walking out.
But then I heard that whimpering breath. That shallow, careful respiration, the kind a child uses when swallowing has become an event rather than a reflex. A strained breath that hurts when it passes over very damaged soft tissue.
I’ve spent enough time in enough acute-care environments that certain sounds have bypassed my conscious processing and gonedirectly to the part of my brain that catalogs clinical information. I heard it, and I knew, before I looked, roughly what I was going to find.
The girl is maybe five or six. Fever flush is clearly visible even in the shitty hallway light. The stillness of a child conserving energy because fever costs more than healthy people realize. Her head, resting in the woman’s lap. The woman’s hand, moving in slow circles on her back, even and automatic, the motion of someone who has been doing it long enough that it’s gone past conscious to something else.
She hasn’t looked up yet. She’s looking at her daughter with an expression I’ve seen enough times in enough different contexts to know what it means. Someone holding themselves together by sheer will, who has been doing it so long that the will has begun to show at the edges.
I don’t typically stop for it. And yet, here I am. Stopped.
When the woman looks up, my feet have nowhere else to go. Honey-blonde hair coming loose from whatever was holding it, brown eyes with gold in the undertone that the fluorescent light does not flatter. That’s okay, though. Her eyes don’t need flattering light to be stunning. She has the face of someone who’s beautiful without enhancing it. She’d look odd with colorful makeup. Whatever she’s doing now, natural or natural-like, it works for her.
Fuck, she’s so young. Mid-twenties, maximum. The little girl could be her daughter or her sister. I can’t tell.
She asks if I’m the new doctor. I lie.
I tell myself to do a quick intake, write a script for the kid, hand it over, done. “What’s her name?”
“Opal. Opal Swan,” the woman says. Her voice is smooth and a little deep for someone her age.
I spread my lips over my teeth and move my cheeks along with them, letting the imitation smile meet my eyes. If I don’t concentrate on smiling, it comes off cold.
Threatening, I’ve been told more than once.
The little girl winces as she tries to return the expression.
“No need to smile or talk, Opal. I’m going to take a look at your throat now, okay?”
