Sleep was fruitless. Daniel heard a rooster crow, a dog barking in the distance. He turned on the light to see that the clock read just past 4:00 a.m. It was midmorning in Chicago, and if he were still there he’d most likely be at the hospital looking at charts, starting his morning rounds. It would be a typical day, just like that early morning the four-year-old was brought in to the hospital with a slight fever and loss of appetite. She’d been lethargic and vomiting, her parents said, all flu-like symptoms. Daniel checked all her vitals, gave her a small dose of aspirin, told the parents to keep her hydrated, and sent her home. The little girl returned two days later, unconscious after suffering a seizure. Daniel’s thoughts turned over and over in his memory. What had he missed on her first visit? Had he been too complacent, too quick to dismiss her symptoms as the flu when he should have been more thorough? He’d been tired, working an extra shift in the emergency room with patients still waiting. Not long after the little girl returned she’d gone into cardiac arrest and stopped breathing. By the time they resuscitated and stabilized her, she had suffered permanent brain damage. What Daniel assumed was a case of the flu had triggered something else, an abnormality sparked by his giving her aspirin. “You couldn’t have known,” his colleagues reassured, unable to look him in the eyes. It could have been any one of them, and the relief that it wasn’t could be seen in their fleeting gaze. There wasn’t much he could do except to make the child as comfortable as possible. Daniel had seen fatalities before—death was a part of his profession—but he couldn’t help but feel his mistake had damaged the little girl’s life in a way crueler than death.

Daniel quit his coveted position at the hospital, refusing to be branded the Oriental doctor who had made the tragic mistake. All that he’d worked so hard for was suddenly gone.

He had nowhere to go but home.

* * *