The vote took eleven minutes.
Dr. Osei read the resolution in a hoarse voice.
Summary suspension of Dr. Marcus Hayes’s clinical privileges, effective immediately.
Referral to the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation for falsific*tion of a medical record.
Rescission of the clinical excellence award.
Removal from Project Lifeline, with Dr. Raymond Voss to assume the leadership of the program.
Marcus didn’t speak.
He took off his white coat, slowly, and he folded it over the back of his chair, as though that were a thing a man could do politely.
The gold Rolex slid to the end of his wrist and caught the light one last time.
Then Dr. Prescott came down from the head table and stopped in front of me.
“I owe you an apology I don’t know how to make,” she said.
“You owe the next patient a better system,” I said.
“What would you ask of this hospital?”
I turned and looked at Denise in the back row, who was crying without making a sound.
“Give me a room,” I said. “And an hour.”
Chapter 5: The Open Chart
The divorce was final in January.
It took eleven minutes in a courtroom on Daley Plaza, and it ended exactly the way I had proposed it on the first day: fifty-fifty on the brownstone, and everything else kept by whoever had bought it.
Marcus did not contest a single line.
Three months later, the state suspended his license for two years, and the hospital quietly took his name off the Foundation’s wall.
He wrote me one letter, on plain paper, with no return address.
I am sorry I was too busy, it said.
I read it once, standing at my kitchen counter.
Then I put it in a drawer, because it was an apology to a woman who no longer lived there.
Sarah sold the Tiffany band for me in February, to a collector in Evanston, and I never asked what it brought.
I only asked where the check should go.
That was how the Open Chart Project began.
It started in a borrowed office on the nineteenth floor of Metropolitan General, with two desks, a secondhand printer, and a marker-lettered sign.
Anyone who has been a patient here may request their audit trail, it said. We will help you read it.
Most people have no idea they have the right.
