“Let go of my wrist.”
“I was too busy! That’s all it was. I was in a quarantine unit saving lives—”
“Dr. Hayes,” Luis said, from his desk, in a voice I had never heard him use. “Please release the lady’s arm.”
Marcus looked down at his own hand as if it belonged to somebody else.
He let go.
“I’ll give you one chance,” I said. “Resign from Project Lifeline, and report yourself to the board.”
He laughed.
“Report myself for what? Being busy?”
“For 2:31 a.m.”
He stopped laughing.
I watched the bl*od go out of his face, slowly, the way the tide goes out.
“You can’t prove anything,” he said, but the words came out like something coming apart in his mouth.
“I don’t have to,” I said. “The system did.”
I walked into the elevator, and the doors closed, and in the brushed-steel reflection I saw my husband standing very still in the middle of the lobby, with one hand half-raised, as if he had meant to catch something.
At 9 p.m., Sarah called.
“The hospital moved first,” she said. “Marcus’s department filed an emergency request for a Medical Executive Committee special session, Wednesday at seven. The agenda item says, and I’m quoting, ‘unfounded allegations by a disgruntled former spouse.'”
I was standing at the window again.
“He’s going on offense.”
“He is,” Sarah said. “Clara, he doesn’t know what we have.”
The lake was black, and Navy Pier glittered in it.
“No,” I said. “He doesn’t.”
Chapter 4: The Medical Executive Committee
The Medical Executive Committee met on the second floor of Metropolitan General, in a wood-paneled auditorium that smelled of floor wax and burnt coffee.
Nearly seventy people had come.
Physicians in white coats, board trustees in dark suits, department chairs, and, in the back row, Denise Walker in her good navy blazer, with the manila envelope on her knees.
At the head table sat the chair, Dr. Harold Osei, and beside him the CEO, Dr. Linda Prescott, a silver-haired woman who had once told me, at a compliance dinner, that she read every audit footnote.
Marcus sat at the center of the room in a charcoal suit, his gold Rolex on his left wrist, with two hospital attorneys on either side.
He did not look at me.
He had told the committee that I was ill, angry, and weap*nizing my professional access to punish a man who worked eighty-hour weeks to save lives.
