When Will was in his third year of medical school, he spent four weeks on a family medicine rotation in small-town Wisconsin, long days stuffing himself in the same exam room over and over again with the physician, the patient, and whatever family members had come along. The office had one nurse and no receptionist, minimal equipment, and temperamental internet service, and while he was there, he learned more about medicine than he had from any classroom or clinical experience before or after. Over the course of her days—most of which clocked in at around eleven hours—Dr. Calhoun saw everything from pink eye to prostate cancer. She didn’t just know everyone’s health history; she also knew the names of their kids and their pets. Her tiny office constantly looked like a bomb full of paper had gone off in it, she never had a pen when she needed it, and the maddest she ever got at Will was on a day three weeks in—right when he was starting to feel loose, confident—after he’d seen a patient for a minor cooking burn.

“Never heard somebody whine so much,” he’d said, when the guy had finally left the office, a bandage around his arm that was more about placation than treatment.

Dr. Calhoun had turned on him with the kind of speed he’d started to think, from the slow way she moved throughout the day, was impossible.

“I know you did not say a patient whined,” she’d snapped, and then she’d read him a riot act he’d never really forgotten: about pain and perspective, about fear and loneliness, about respect and empathy and kindness. At the time, Will had thought he’d already known all about those things, had thought that losing his parents the way he had had taught him what he needed to know.

But Dr. Calhoun had taught him that every patient—even the ones with minor cooking burns and a penchant for exaggeration—deserved the same kind of empathetic care as someone with a traumatic injury, or a chronic illness, or a life-threatening condition.

Nora Clarke, though. Will thought Nora Clarke with an acute sinus infection brought on by allergies might even test the limits of Dr. Calhoun’s patience.

“I don’t want to,” she said from her fussy, flower-upholstered couch, her legs tucked up underneath her.