Okay. She’d escaped the subway and things were looking up. She felt a little better about her patient too; after all, he had survived. Or at least he had survived long enough to be handed off to the next ED doc at shift change. He should have gone directly to the ICU, but the ICU was full, so he was boarding in the ED in the meantime, all tubed and lined and ventilated and waiting on one of the ICU docs to come down and manage all his drips. He was on a couple of pressors—IV medications to keep his blood pressure high enough to perfuse his brain and body—and that was not a good sign. He needed constant attention, which meant the oncoming ED doc was going to have a hellish start to her shift.

Dammit! She was thinking about him again. Compton stopped walking for a moment, transfixed by her recollection of the man’s face as he tried and failed to suck in air. Panic welled up, like vomit, in her throat. She’d almost sent him home! What had she missed? As she replayed the scenario yet again, a perverse corner of her mind supplied a mental soundtrack: thudding, ominous drumbeats. Why? Why had this happened? Maybe if she allowed herself one more time to run through it—maybe if she wallowed in the shame and fear and dismay caused by almost losing this man, this young man, this presumably healthy man who should have been fine, who should not have keeled over, clutching his chest, just after he’d gotten his discharge paperwork—maybe if she grieved for this man, this almost death, maybe she could get it out of her system.

Up ahead, an empty bench guarded the entrance to Riverside at 103rd. Compton staggered to it and sat, letting her head fall into her hands so her hair covered her face, rocking back and forth like a disturbed person. The man was going to die; she knew it. She must have missed something, and he was going to die. It took all her energy to suppress the urge to throw her head back and cry.

A bit of time passed; Compton wasn’t certain how long. She leapt up so suddenly and aggressively a passing dog walker stumbled backward, shrieking in terror. After she apologized to the dog walker, and for good measure the dog, she burst into a full sprint in the direction of her building. She was going to run out of time.

Thus preoccupied, Compton failed to notice something was off. It didn’t hit her until she’d ridden the tiny elevator to their floor and entered the apartment and tucked her plastic clogs in the shoe drawer in the small mudroom off the foyer and padded down the hall to the kitchen, still panting from her exertions.

There was no noise.