Cora shrugged again. “I don’t know. Mr. Dover makes it interesting. Fun.”

“How so?” I pressed, wanting to get a sense of what was important to Cora.

“Sometimes he dresses up like characters when he teaches and he listens when you talk to him,” Cora said, pulling on the silver ribbon dangling from the balloon.

“What do you talk about?” I asked as I settled in a chair next to Cora’s bed.

“School, friends, just regular stuff like that. I used to eat lunch in his classroom and we’d talk. My sister says he’s weird, but I don’t think so.”

“Weird in what way?” I asked, making sure I kept my voice light, conversational, even though the fact that Cora ate lunch in a teacher’s classroom raised some questions for me.

“I don’t know, just weird. She said he was a perv, but he isn’t. He’s just nice. He cares,” Cora explained.

I wanted to talk more about Mr. Dover with Cora—something felt just a bit off-center about him—but Mara breezed back into the room. “What are you two chatting about?” she asked, coming to Cora’s side.

“Nothing,” Cora said, casting a worried glance my way.

“I was just asking Cora how she was feeling,” I said, making a mental note to find out why she didn’t want her mother to know that we were talking about Mr. Dover.

I said my goodbyes and reminded Mara and Cora that I would be back in the morning but if they needed me for anything sooner they certainly could give me a call. I hurried through the corridors in a rush to get to my next appointment when I saw John Dover sitting in a bank of chairs near the elevators. “I was hoping to catch you,” he said, rising to his feet. “Can we speak for a moment? About Cora?”

I tried not to show my surprise. Mara must have told him what kind of doctor I was. “Of course I can’t share any medical information about Cora,” I explained. “But if you know of anything that might be helpful to Cora’s situation, I’m sure her family would appreciate it.”

“I’m sorry to say I can’t help with finding out who did this to Cora—” Mr. Dover slid his hands into the pockets of his coat “—but she’s such a fragile little girl. I worry that she won’t pull through this.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. Cora’s injuries were terrible, but from what her other doctors were saying, they weren’t life-threatening.

“Mentally,” Mr. Dover said almost apologetically, as if he was betraying Cora. “After what’s happened I worry that she’ll retreat even more deeply into herself. Cora always seems to be in her own little world.”

“You see this at school?” I asked.