TOM CAGE GOT slowly up from his chair, then locked his office door. Melba would panic if she turned that handle and found it locked, but he didn’t want her coming in for at least a couple of minutes. Going to the bookcase behind his desk, he took down a signed first edition of The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, a treasure that survived the house fire only because he’d had it on his office shelves at the time. None of his nurses would open this book, not even if they were desperate for something to read, because it was set during the Civil War. Tom fanned the pages to the three-quarters point, then reached in and slid out a Polaroid photograph he’d kept since 1968.

The faded snapshot, which still had the primary-color saturation of a Technicolor movie, showed Viola Turner standing in front of a cabinet in Tom’s private office in the old clinic on Monroe Street. She wasn’t smiling. She was looking directly into the camera with a candid vulnerability that no one at the clinic had ever seen. Gone were the professional smile and practiced deference. In this picture, Viola was not the perfect ambassador for her race that her parents had raised her to be, but merely a woman in her late twenties, her defenses down, her eyes unguarded, her carefully straightened hair askew. Tom had shot the photo on a rainy afternoon one week after he patched up Jimmy Revels and Luther Davis, following their brawl with the Double Eagles. By that afternoon he was as different from the doctor who’d treated those boys as the Tom Cage who left Korea had been from the eighteen-year-old version of himself who’d arrived there in 1950.

What had changed him was Viola Turner.

The day after their midnight surgery, Viola had opened up the clinic as usual. By the time Tom got there, the surgery room was spic-and-span again, the bloody towels gone, the instruments autoclaved and ready for a new patient. The room where Tom had treated the Eagles was just as clean. Dr. Lucas didn’t notice anything out of order, nor did the clinic’s female staff. But Tom and Viola could no longer carry off the act they’d been perfecting for the previous four years. Their frantic embrace in the corner of the garage had shattered some boundary between them, and every instant of eye contact now communicated hidden significance. Tom was certain everyone in the clinic could sense the new intimacy between them, like a magnetic field made visible. He’d sensed the same thing whenever Gavin Edwards had been involved with one of the office girls. Edwards had never gone out of his way to hide his affairs, but even if he had, it would have been pointless. Once certain levels of intimacy have been reached, they simply cannot be concealed within a small group.