Twenty minutes later the formally dressed guest manager who’d shown her to her room on the ninth floor backed out and closed the door behind him. En route to the room he had described the hotel’s facilities and services, which included a fully staffed twenty-four-hour spa/exercise facility with an outdoor Olympic-size pool. Jennifer decided that she was going to make an effort to enjoy her stay at least a little, as Neil had suggested. Briefly thinking about Neil raised her hackles, so she put him out of her mind.

After fastening the safety lock on the door, Jennifer opened her bags, unpacked, and took a long, hot shower. Once out of the shower, she puzzled over what to do. Although she knew she must be exhausted, the excitement of the arrival and the knowledge it was midday in L.A. had given her yet another wind. She knew that if she tried to sleep she’d toss and turn and become frustrated. Instead, she donned one of the luxurious Turkish robes hanging from behind the bathroom door, turned down the comforter in the expansive king-size bed, propped herself up with a clutch of down pillows, and turned on the impressive flat-screen TV with its remote. She had no idea what she would find on the TV, but she didn’t care. The idea was to relax and fool her body into thinking it was time to sleep.

What she did find was a lot more English-speaking channels than she expected, so channel surfing was quite entertaining. When she stumbled on the BBC she almost stopped to actually watch the news. But finding it difficult to concentrate, she moved on and soon found CNN. Surprised to find an American cable network, she watched it for a while, since she didn’t recognize the news anchors. After fifteen minutes had gone by and she was about to move on, the female anchor caught her attention by beginning a piece on medical tourism similar to the one that Jennifer had heard while waiting in the UCLA Medical Center’s surgical lounge. Wondering if her grandmother’s name would again be mentioned, she listened carefully. But her grandmother was not part of the segment. It was another patient’s name, but it was the same hospital, the Queen Victoria.