Emily twisted her hair into a bun and considered her husband. “You know,” she said. “If you want to do something else, I’m not stopping you. Golds can . . . we can . . . do other things.”

“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “I meant that we’ve been given a gift, and you’re talking about throwing it away.”

“But don’t I matter, too?” Emily asked. “Doesn’t it matter how I feel? What using this gift, as you call it, is doing to me?”

He was quiet for a moment. “Who do you save,” he asked, “the one or the many?”

Emily sat, shocked into silence. He was putting everyone before her. Literally every patient’s well-being was more important than her own. How was this the man she’d vowed to spend her life with? How was this her kind, empathetic husband? The one who always took care of her? What had happened? It felt like his heart had enough compassion in it for everyone but her right now.

“You kissed him?” Ezra asked, after she went silent.

She’d said it already. He was going to make her say it again. “I did, for a moment, but then I stopped. I shouldn’t have. I just . . . he’d just apologized for how he’d reacted to the miscarriage we had in college and I was crying and he was there and you’d gone and . . . It’s not an excuse, but maybe an explanation.”

“So it’s my fault?” Ezra said to her.

“I didn’t say that,” Emily answered, sitting up on the couch.

“Yes,” he answered. “You did.”

Emily took a breath. Was he right? She had no idea at this point, her thoughts so infused with feeling it was hard to be objective, to stay logical. “I want to call NYU today and tell them that they should start looking for someone else. I’ll stay until they do. This week is fall break anyway, so—”

“I don’t think you should do that,” Ezra said, standing up.

Emily closed her eyes for a moment and then opened them again. “It’s not your choice,” she said. “It’s mine. It’s my job, and I get to choose if I want to keep doing it.”

“Take some time,” he said. “Really think this through. Once you’ve slept some more.”

“I’m not going to change my mind,” she told him. And she knew it, deep inside her, she knew that something had shifted, that no matter what happened, her future today was different than her future yesterday.

“Em,” he said. “Please listen to me.”

“I need you to listen to me. To believe me. I need you to trust that I know my own mind, that I know what I need to do.”

He looked at her, his eyes shining with unshed tears. “That’s the problem, isn’t it,” he said. “I don’t think I do.”