I let him not say it.
For now.
Not because I'm backing down, but because I've worked enough crisis situations to know that pushing someone past what they're ready to give gets you incomplete information delivered badly. Whatever name is sitting behind his eyes right now, I need it whole, not dragged out in pieces in a car outside my apartment building.
I get out and go upstairs. I change into clothes that are actually mine and I stand in my kitchen drinking water and looking at the refrigerator like it might offer some kind of guidance.
It doesn't.
I go to work.
The ER at St. Raphael's is the best place I know to stop thinking about your own life.
Other people's emergencies have a way of making yours very quiet and very manageable by comparison. By the time I've triaged a constructi
