She’d grown up poor in the Pacific Northwest, she began, mostly because her father was bad with money, hilariously bad. He’d head off to get groceries with the last of their savings and come home with some frivolous gift. And so she and her mother would starve, but they’d starve in brand-new scarves, or with a crystal fixture shining over the table. They’d starve in love with him.

“He could make you laugh so hard, you didn’t remember you’d eaten nothing but peanut butter for days, or that your shoes were too small, or that the Christmas tree had been hacked from the side of the interstate.”

But while Dr. Kriss was on scholarship, studying medicine at the University of Washington, he came down with a degenerative disease.

“MS?” I asked.

“We never found out. If we’d had more money, we could’ve had better doctors, a clear diagnosis maybe. I’m still not sure.”

He’d have agonizing abdominal pain that didn’t respond to conventional treatment, she explained. Then it would migrate to his throat and he couldn’t speak, as if his breath were coming through a chewed-up plastic straw. His whole body racked with fever, he’d be bedridden for days.

She told me how a young Eva Kriss undertook to penetrate the mystery. He’d always told her she was the best, the brainiest. She skipped class to study him, she stayed up through the night, she dug obscure texts out of the library, seeking anything, ancient or modern, that resembled his symptoms.

“But nothing worked,” she said. “And one day, he was gone.” She looked down at Floella’s case file and seemed to read the words: “Something went out of my life.”

Later, as I transcribed the interview, the hiss of the tape seemed to seep into the foreground, as if a shroud had been thrown around the two of us.

“Do you understand?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Then understand this. I made him a promise, a long time ago, to reach for the very highest. You could say the impetus behind my whole career has been to make good on that promise. Because in his case, it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough.” She looked down, embarrassed by the tears in her eyes.

“It’s okay,” I said.

Since his death, she told me, she’d made a vow to herself: the moment a patient awakens, she’ll be there, the doctor, to tell them they’re fine, that it all went well, everything is okay.

“I can see him in their faces,” she said, “and it’s like I have those last weeks back again, and I’m enough, smart enough and good enough, to find the solution he needs.”