You can bet I’ll find more bad news when I open her chest in a few minutes.

I always do.

What you need to know about Lainey is she’s not going to make it.

It’s okay, I already told her parents.

V

 

THAT’S ME AN hour ago, approaching the conference room to meet Lainey’s parents, Jordan and Will Calfee.

Of Calfee Coffee.

As I enter, Jordan and Will are on the sofa, grim-faced, holding hands. Nurse Sally’s in the straight-back chair, giving me the evil eye. Security Joe’s standing at the doorway.

As always, I nod at Security Joe and say, “Are you feeling okay? Because you don’t look so good.”

As always, he ignores me.

Jordan and Will jump to their feet, searching my eyes.

If my eyes could talk, they’d say I’m dying inside, thinking how the Calfee’s lives will change forever when I kill their kid on my operating table.

Nurse Sally hates me. She’s black, two hundred fifty pounds, her age a complete mystery. Could be forty, could be sixty. She’s a wonderful, caring person, my polar opposite. She visits the parents before they meet me, warns them about my notoriously foul bedside manner, and attempts to calm them down after I leave.

Security Joe is early-forties, former Marine, big, tough, freaky quiet. The kind of guy you’d expect to see guarding the president.

Joe’s chief of security, here to guard me from possible assault. He blends into the background, always ready to step between me and an angry parent. While Joe couldn’t care less if I offend the parents, Sally constantly wants to slap me up the side of my head for doing so.

I’d love to have Nurse Sally’s attitude, and probably would, if I had her job.

Or any other job.

I’m not asking for sympathy, but imagine if your job required you to do something that made you physically and mentally sick every time you did it. I know you can’t relate, and there are no good examples, but you know that chalky stuff you have to drink the day before getting a colonoscopy? It tastes like hell and makes you shit for twelve hours straight?

Let’s say your job was to drink that chalk every day of your life.

You’d like to quit, but you’re the only one in the world who can do it, and every day you don’t drink the chalk, a child you’ve met will die.

That’s a lot of pressure.

After a few years, it gets to your head.

Makes you do crazy things in order to cope.

So that’s what I do, perform one or two of these horrific, impossible operations, then go bat shit crazy and run out into the world and do stupid, dangerous things, like breaking into people’s houses when they’re on vacation, and assuming their lives.

VI

 

THE CALFEES ARE a young, pretty couple, with tons of money. This situation with Lainey Sue is probably the first bad thing that’s ever happened to them that couldn’t be solved with cash and a phone call.

After failing to find reassurance in my eyes, Jordan falls into her husband’s arms and sobs.

I’d love to give this couple hope, but like I said, I don’t get the easy cases. When I get the call it means a child’s condition has passed critical. It means hope has left the building.

Like most dads before him, Will says, “We want Lainey Sue to have the finest treatment available. Spare no expense. Money’s no object.”

This probably impresses Jordan, but in my experience it’s complete and utter bullshit.

After the fact, he’ll complain about the bill, the access, the forms, rules and regulations, the nurses in the recovery unit, and everything else that inconveniences him in the slightest. He’ll threaten to sue me and the hospital over our fees.

After all, I killed his kid.