I roll my eyes. Congrats on the dollars? The longer I stare at the screen the more ridiculous the words look. I have never celebrated money. But I cannot unsend it, so I put the phone away and ready my metro card.

Clinic moves at a frantic pace. I check the schedule every chance I get to be sure Shair hasn’t called in to cancel. Lacey’s hair is faint pink at the ends. She is wearing glasses with lilac frames. When she hands me a chart, I look up and see that the glasses don’t have lenses.

“Lacey, your glasses are . . . missing?” I say, baffled.

Lacey laughs and taps the hinge of her frames, then presses her fingers to her lips like we have some inside secret. I envy how lightly she moves through her day.

I do not eat lunch. I see one patient after another, one family after another. I’m on my third cup of coffee and feeling like my heart might pound out of my chest when I sit with a forty-year-old man diagnosed with a tumor that is choking off his small intestine. He works as a docent at a museum. His wife holds their one-month-old girl in her arms. The baby’s mouth makes small sucking movements as she sleeps, and small as she is, she has filled the room with that newborn scent—talcum and milk. His wife looks like she hasn’t slept in days. She rocks her child closer to her chest, as if cancer might jump off the counter and sink into her pink skin. I know this is the last time they’ll bring the baby to clinic.

I see a woman in her fifties who is a sculptor and a dance teacher. There is less of her than at our last visit, as if she’s wet clay on a pottery wheel, being reshaped into something new. I’d seen her three months ago, but on the day of surgery she called the office and said she was going to try homeopathic treatments recommended by her friend.

“I am glad to see you again.”

“I don’t know how this happened. I did a lot of research. I thought this would help more,” she says, her voice small.

“It is not your fault. There’s nothing you did wrong,” I say. Even heavy smokers are shocked when they are diagnosed with cancer. Not one person I’ve ever cared for has seen it coming.

“I know. It’s everywhere now,” she says. “I think it’s in our food. We’re probably stuffing our mouths with it and wondering how it gets into us. Why aren’t they researching this?”

“We don’t have all the answers,” I admit.