LUB-DUB, LUB-DUB … THE meaty sounds of a healthy heart were clear through my wooden Pinard stethoscope. Beating a little faster than normal—and no wonder—but healthy. I straightened up and Bree instantly clutched the neck of her blouse closed, her face tense.

“Your heart sounds perfect, darling,” I said. “I’m sure that it’s a bit of atrial fibrillation, but that’s just a matter of stray electrical impulses. You aren’t going to have a heart attack or anything of that sort.”

The tension in her face eased, and my own heart clenched a little.

“Well, thank God for that.” A thick lock of hair had come loose from its ribbon, and I saw that her hand was trembling as she brushed it back from her face. “But it—is it going to keep happening?”

“I don’t know.” Aside from bad news, “I don’t know” is the worst thing a doctor can say to a patient, but it’s unfortunately the most usual thing, too. I took a deep breath and turned to my medicine shelves.

“Oh, God,” Bree said, the genuine apprehension in her voice tinged with reluctant amusement. “You’re getting out more whisky. It must be serious.”

“Well, if you don’t want any, I do,” I said. I’d chosen the good stuff, the Jamie Fraser Special, rather than the strictly medicinal whisky I gave the patients, and the scent of it rose warm and lively, displacing the smells of turpentine, scorched metal, and pollen-laced dust.

“Oh, I’m pretty sure I do.” She took the tin cup and inhaled the comforting fumes, her eyes closing involuntarily and her face relaxing.

“So,” she said, raising an eyebrow. “What do you know?”

I rolled my own whisky slowly round my tongue, then swallowed, too.

“Well, as I said, atrial fibrillation is a matter of irregular electrical impulses. Your heart muscle is sound, but it’s—once in a while—getting its signals crossed, so to speak. Normally, all the muscle fibers in your atria contract at once; when they don’t get a synchronized message from the electrical node in your heart that supplies them, they contract more or less at random.”

Brianna swallowed another sip, nodding.

“That’s pretty much what it feels like, all right. But you said it’s not dangerous? It’s freaking scary.”

I hesitated, a fraction of a second too long. No one but Jamie was more sensitive to the transparency of my face, and I saw the alarm rise again at the back of her eyes.

“It’s not very dangerous,” I said hastily. “And you’re young and very fit; it’s much less likely.”

“What’s less likely?” She put down the cup, agitated, and glanced involuntarily up at the ceiling; Mandy was back in the children’s room just overhead, loudly singing “Frère Jacques” to her doll Esmeralda.