My last case of the day is canceled because the patient forgot to stop taking her daily aspirin a week prior to surgery, as I’d asked. People are curious creatures. We forget to skip our medicine almost as often as we forget to take our medicine. We hate to exercise. We feel good when we exercise.

I want to move forward.

I keep looking back.

I’m on the train headed into Midtown to meet Adam for dinner. I’ve brought Clay Porter’s book with me. His words have the richness of fiction. The people he portrays are flawed and hopeful. He writes about a seven-year-old boy who works in his father’s tin shop, cutting sheets of tin into round discs with a chisel and hammer, and I can almost hear the clanging.

I wonder what Clay observed in Afghanistan. Maybe he walked past our family home, my elementary school, or the palace with its repaired buildings and grounds. I make a note to look for his articles when I get home, to read his observations from my homeland.

My secret homeland.

On reaching my stop, I slip the book back into my tote and pull on my gloves before I exit the train. The temperature has dropped about ten degrees since this morning. Storefronts twinkle with strings of white lights and sprigs of fir. We are meeting at a Peruvian restaurant just three blocks from here. It’s one of our regular halfway spots and has a sparse menu, but the food is so good I haven’t tired of it yet.

Adam wraps his arms around me and kisses me before we enter. The hostess seats us at a corner table. Two glasses of water appear, each with far too much ice. He is cheerful, almost surprisingly so given our text messages. I’m wondering if I read too much into the exchange.

“So tell me,” he says. “What did you have going on today?”

“Are you in the mood to hear about small bowel?”

“Maybe not,” Adam admits. He was once clearing some workspace on my desk and found one of my anatomy books, a photographic collection of dissected cadavers. He didn’t eat meat for a month. “Just feel like we’ve got a lot of catching up to do every time I see you.”

“I’m not going to end up in another social media post, am I?” I ask.

Adam shakes his head.

“Look, I took it down. I put up a picture with my brother’s dog.”

“Why not a picture with his hamster?”

“Dogs poll better.”

“And it’s all about the polling,” I say.

“It’s all about the people,” he insists. “That’s why people liked the post with you. It was about people.”