Chapter 30

Ben agrees to take Leah to preschool the next morning so that I can get to work early and visit Herman Katz in the neuro ICU, a place I’ve always found eerily quiet and clinical. I’m glad to find Adam Wiseman at the nursing station, documenting at a computer. Adam is a slim guy with nerdy black glasses that accentuates his image as a brainy neurologist. He smiles grimly when he looks up and sees me standing before him.

“Jane,” he says. “Thanks for coming by.”

“How’s Mr. Katz doing?” I ask.

Adam rises from his chair and stretches out his back. “Stable. We’ll probably transfer him to the floor soon.”

“And by stable, you mean…?”

He shakes his head. “His deficits haven’t improved at all.”

I suck in a breath. “He’s got a daughter. Did you call her? ”

“Yeah, before I talked to you,” he says. “She’s got childcare issues, but she told me she was going to try to get a flight in.”

I push away the sick feeling in my stomach. “Can I go see him?”

Adam nods. “I think it might be good for him to see a familiar face.”

Yeah. If he even recognizes me.

“Adam,” I say softly. I glance around to make sure none of the nurses are nearby. “Can I ask you a weird question?”

“Sure.” He frowns at me. “What’s up?”

I hesitate. Just asking the question that’s been running through my mind would be potentially damning. But I have to know.

“Do you think something went wrong during the surgery?” I ask. “I mean, do you think that… that maybe it wasn’t done properly?”

I can see the answer all over Adam’s face. “I don’t know,” he quickly hedges. “I don’t really know Dr. Reilly. I’ve heard good things about him though. But of course, I can’t help but wonder…”

We stand there staring at each other for a minute. Finally, Adam says, “Why do you ask, Jane?”

“Just wondering,” I mumble.

After all, I’ve kept Ryan’s secret for this long .

Adam directs me down the hall to Mr. Katz’s room. The ICU smells like betadine, the odor permeating my nostrils and making me feel vaguely woozy. I steady myself and walk down to the third room on the left, the one with KATZ printed in magic market on a removable sign next to the door. I knock gently on the partially ajar door, but don’t hear a response.

Okay, I’m going in.

It’s funny because I had never realized that Mr. Katz was actually always in quite good shape for his age. Of course, seventy is the new sixty, but Mr. Katz just never looked like a man in his seventies. He looked sixty tops.

Now he looks a hundred.

I see him lying in the hospital bed, the oxygen nasal cannula prongs stuck up his nostrils. He seems tiny and shrunken. Tufts of white hair stick up off his pale, fragile scalp in every direction. He’s asleep in his bed, but his mouth is hanging open, revealing his dry tongue. He’s got the “O sign”—a mouth that hangs open in your sleep is not a good prognostic sign.

See, Mr. Katz? There are worse things than cancer.

“Mr. Katz?” I whisper.

He doesn’t answer. For a moment, I’m scared he’s dead, although the monitors attached to his chest are recording a normal heart rate and rhythm. After a minute, his eyes flutter open. They’re brown and watery and bloodshot .

I’d been scared that Mr. Katz would have absolutely no clue who I was. But I can see the recognition in his eyes, even if he can’t manage to say my name. He opens his mouth to speak but no sounds come out. He’s profoundly aphasic. His stroke knocked out all his language centers. They’ve destroyed one of the very things that makes him human.

His right arm is propped up on a pillow, swollen and immobile. I walk closer to the bed and Mr. Katz holds out his left arm to me. I grasp his hand in my own—his feels cold and shriveled. I sit down at the side of his bed and watch as his eyes fill with tears.

“You’re going to get better,” I promise. Even though I can’t really promise that. It doesn’t matter anyway—I don’t think he understands a word I’m saying.

I hate this. I hate that this is my fault.

Well, not only my fault.

“Jane!”

I turn my head and see Ryan standing at the door to Mr. Katz’s room, dressed in his green scrubs. He looks more rumpled than usual—instead of being clean-shaved, he has golden stubble on his chin and his hair is disheveled. I wonder if he’s been here all night. I haven’t pulled an all-nighter since residency.

“What are you doing here?” he hisses at me.

I apologize to Mr. Katz and stand up to face Ryan. “This is my patient. ”

“No, he’s my patient.” Ryan glares at me. “How did you find out he was here? Wiseman told you, didn’t he?”

I don’t say anything.

“I knew it!” he growls. “I’m going to kill that arrogant prick. He should never have—”

“Adam isn’t an arrogant prick,” I interrupt him. I can see that not only does Mr. Katz seem startled, but we’ve drawn the attention of several nurses, who probably overheard Ryan angrily badmouthing their attending physician. “Could we talk about this somewhere else? Please?”

“Fine.” Ryan stalks away from me, and I rush after him down the hallway. Good to see that his temperament hasn’t changed at all.

I follow him until we reach the call room just outside the ICU. The door to the tiny room is open, revealing a single bed and small wooden desk. The two of us have been in a lot of call rooms together in the past, but never to fight. But we’re not going to do that other thing again. That part of our relationship is over.

“So why are you so angry that Adam told me about Mr. Katz?” I say to Ryan, once we’re in the privacy of the call room.

“It’s not your concern,” he says. “He and I are managing the patient. No offense, Jane, but you’re just his primary care doctor.”

Gee, thanks .

“But I knew him really well,” I say. I consider sitting on the bed, but I can tell Ryan wants to stand. He never sits—it’s a surgeon thing. “I had a right to know. Don’t you think so?”

Ryan runs a hand through his already messy hair. His hair is so light in color that I somehow hadn’t realized quite how much gray was threaded through it until this very moment. “When Wiseman told you about it, did you ask him if I screwed up?”

“What?”

He inspects my face. “You did, didn’t you? That’s the first thing you asked him. You said, ‘Did Dr. Reilly fuck up the surgery?’ Admit it.”

I bite my lip. “Well, it’s only natural to wonder…”

“Stroke is a known complication of carotid endarterectomy,” he practically spits at me. “It’s a risky surgery and your patient knew the risks. It went fine—perfectly. Then he stroked out. You think I know why?”

I shake my head. “I wasn’t blaming you…”

“The hell you weren’t!” Red rushes into Ryan’s cheeks—damn, he’s pissed off. “You thought that because I’m sick, I shouldn’t be operating anymore. That’s what you were thinking.”

I want to tell him he’s wrong, but he’ll know I’m lying. That’s exactly what I was thinking .

He shakes his head at me. “If I thought my… condition was any danger to my patients, I’d stop operating. Immediately. I mean, I will… when…”

He seems to deflate somewhat. He sinks down onto the bed, and stares down at his hands. I sit down next to him, but I’m not sure what to say. I can’t tell him everything is going to be okay. It isn’t. It definitely isn’t, and he knows it.

“Jane, you have to believe me,” he says, “if I ever feel like I can’t operate anymore at a hundred percent, I’ll stop. I would never, ever jeopardize my patients.”

“I believe you,” I murmur.

“They’ve got plenty of administrative and research work for me to do,” he says. “Don’t worry.”

We had a conversation just like this when I first found out that he had Huntington’s. He reassured me that he’d do paperwork when he couldn’t operate. And after that…

I’ve got a gun locked away in my desk drawer at home.

I don’t want to think about that. I don’t know if he was serious or not, and he’s got a lot of time left before he reaches that point. I’m sure he’ll change his mind. I’m encouraged that he doesn’t say it now.

Ryan lets out a long sigh. “It sucks about Mr. Katz.”

I nod. “Yeah.”

We sit there for a minute until Ryan’s phone goes off. I notice that his hand jerks slightly as he attempts to pull it out of his pocket, but I don’t say anything. I’m sure he already knows what I’m thinking.