“Okay,” Pia said to herself, “I’ve got work to do. Now I just have to get that man out of my work space.” Following Rothman out through the door, she headed back to the lab bench where she had set up her temporary work space.

2.

CONVENT OF THE SISTERS OF THE SACRED HEART
WESTCHESTER, NEW YORK
FEBRUARY 28, 2011, 7:20 P.M.

Armed with Dr. Rothman’s pledge of financial support, Pia made an appointment with the mother superior of the convent of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart for that same evening. It wasn’t a meeting she looked forward to. Pia recalled how years before the mother superior had found her as a teenager sitting on the convent wall after getting into a fight with her foster family at the time, who lived a couple of miles away. She had brought Pia inside, and they had talked. The result was that Pia returned the very next weekend, with her family’s permission, to help out in an unstructured fashion. The rest was history, culminating in Pia’s decision, when she aged out of foster care, to join the convent with the idea of possibly becoming a novitiate.

Pia would be forever grateful for what the mother superior had done for her in the years following her moving in, especially as it was an enormous improvement on what she had experienced in the foster care system. Although it was, in reality, another institution, Pia had finally been at peace. She had found the mother superior to be sympathetic not only in helping her adjust to the convent’s community living but also in helping her navigate the tempestuous waters in the real world beyond the tranquillity of the convent. It had been at the mother superior’s insistence that Pia turned to academia and became a superior student rather than an adequate one. But obtaining her high school equivalency and attending college had allowed Pia to learn about herself to the extent of realizing that a nun’s life was not for her. Instead she decided on a career in medicine, where she sensed she could excel and find equivalent peace. After all, during her entire tumultuous foster care experience, she had always viewed the doctor as the sine qua non of power and control of one’s personal destiny. But the decision had had consequences, especially with regard to the mother superior.

About five years earlier Pia had made a similar appointment with the woman. It was then that Pia admitted that she was not going to become a sister but rather a doctor. It had been a difficult meeting as the mother superior had been obviously disappointed and made her feelings known. At the same time she had been encouraging about Pia’s new career track and voiced how desperately doctors were needed at their missionary locations in East Africa. Now, as Pia walked into the mother superior’s stark office, she knew she faced as difficult a situation as—and maybe even worse than—when she had decided against becoming a nun. The more she thought about her goals, the more she thought Rothman was right about her being uniquely qualified for medical research.