She stared out the window, her mind still churning too violently to collect and order her thoughts. How much stress could one person tolerate in a day? The first idea to break through with anything approaching coherence was, unexpectedly, guilt. How awful to hate your life’s work! Despite the brutal schedule and occasional agony of her own job, she derived from it a deep sense of purpose and engagement. In how many other occupations could you literally save lives on a daily basis? And she didn’t merely save lives; even in the most mundane encounters, she wielded the power to make another human being’s life a little bit less painful. This thought, of course, led to a dangerous off-ramp: the ruinous thought loop about the man who’d almost died. Who might, even now, be dying. She sucked in a shuddering breath, which Ellis, of course, mistook for distress at his announcement. Wordlessly, he stretched a hand in her direction, guilt etched all over his thin, semi-bearded face.

She’d known, of course, of the various dissatisfactions of her husband’s job: his dislike of some of the men with whom he worked, his weariness with the fourteen-hour days and the constant travel, his philosophical differences with his immediate boss. But clearly she hadn’t appreciated the depth of his discontent.

Her second thought, though, was less noble. How could Ellis do this without thinking of his family’s financial stability? They owned investments and savings, of course, but less than you’d think: it was fiendishly expensive to live where they lived, not to mention their combined half a million dollars in educational loans. This was not a sentiment that could be expressed aloud to anyone outside New York, especially given that their lives were the very definition of privilege. But if they burned through their savings, Compton’s job as an ER doc would not sustain them in their present home. Not even close; society valued hedge fund managers and M&A directors and venture capitalists about a zillion times more than emergency physicians. They’d have to leave New York.

This led to another uncomfortable issue. Was there an implied criticism of her parenting in Ellis’s comments? We never have family meals; we never see our kids’ milestones. Her job required switching from days to afternoons to overnights; she worked weekends and holidays; she worked through school plays and birthdays and illnesses. She had some control over her schedule, but there was a hell of a lot of unavoidable sacrifice in a career in emergency medicine. Was Ellis suggesting she’d neglected their family?