“Dr. Castellano,” Dr. Prescott said. “Do you wish to speak?”
Ian stood up from the third row.
He did not look at Marcus.
He looked at me, and I think it was the bravest thing I have ever watched a person do.
“At 2:26 a.m., Dr. Hayes called me,” he said. “He said, ‘Hold her until nine. Do not let her pull me out.’ I deferred the CT. I am a physician, and I did what a colleague told me instead of what the patient needed. At 9:58, I texted him that she had rupt*red. He replied, ‘Okay. Keep me posted. Mid opening remarks.'”
He held up his phone.
“I have the screenshots. I have had them for six weeks. I should have brought them in on the first day.”
Denise stood up in the back row.
“I have the paging records,” she said, and her voice carried the length of the room. “Six times I told him his wife was critical. Six times he said he’d come when the unit allowed. The unit allowed on day twenty-one.”
She held up the envelope.
“I’m just a nurse. But I kept every page.”
Marcus stood up so abruptly that his chair slid backward.
“I was in a quarantine unit!” he said, and now his voice cracked. “I was doing the largest transplant protocol in the history of this state! I was too busy, all right? I was too busy!”
Dr. Prescott did not raise her voice.
“Section 4, Paragraph B,” she said. “Two hours. You never asked.”
“Marcus.” Dr. Prescott took off her glasses. “Your wife was in this building for thirty days. You looked at her labs forty-one times.”
She let that land.
“You were never too busy to look.”
He turned to me then, for the first time that night, and I saw something move across his face that I had not seen in seven years of marriage.
It was not guilt.
It was fear, plain and childlike.
“Clara,” he said. “Please. Tell them it’s a misunderstanding.”
Seventy people turned to look at me.
I thought of the plaza, and the bouquet, and the rain on my face at the curb.
“It is not a misunderstanding,” I said. “You were busy, Marcus. You were busy deciding I was a woman who exaggerates.”
I picked up my coat from the back of the chair.
“I’m not asking for anything,” I said. “I wanted the record read.”
