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“No, I’m sorry,” Dr. Rios said. “I won’t allow it.”
We’d been going around and around the subject for the past fifteen minutes. But the doctor wouldn’t budge.
She pointed to the graph again. To the rise and fall of the spikes. They were small, but they were there. Despite what I thought, I hadn’t been perfectly calm over the previous hour. I’d had moments of it, moments when my graph leveled out and my pulse and breathing looked perfectly mellow, but then the lines would rise again—probably every time I wondered, “Why isn’t Halli here? Why isn’t this working? Why can’t I find her?”
“It’s the hospital,” I tried to explain again. I remembered seeing some news report once about how some people’s blood pressure goes up whenever they have to have their blood pressure checked in a doctor’
