Mountain Rescue had found him at the bottom of a deep crevasse not more than fifty metres from the clinic’s northern boundary. His neck had broken in the fall. As soon as the local police and coroner were finished, they would strap Ismail’s body to a stretcher and haul him up the mountain. Gessen had passed a restless night, slipping in and out of disturbing dreams. Twice he’d lurched from the bed to pray to whomever might be listening that the boy was found alive. Now, with the immutable fact of Ismail’s death, he dropped his head in his hands.

With the clumsy gait of an accident victim in shock, he stumbled into the bathroom and splashed his face with cold water. Staring back at him from the mirror was his father’s face, ravaged by cancer. Not his real father, a man he’d scarcely known, but the taciturn man who’d raised him as his own son, concealing Gessen’s origins as his mother wished. It wasn’t the cancer that killed his adoptive father in the end, however. Not long after he’d received the news that nothing more could be done, his car plunged off an icy road in the Dolomites. A timely accident. Or was it suicide? He would never know. Both fathers, long dead. Their disappearance from his life should have set him free, but such was not his fate. The two men lived on in his blood and bones. And ever since, he’d carried their ghosts on his back, and with them the long trail of the dead.

All he had left were his two surnames, one given at birth, the other later bestowed upon him, as if meant to wipe out the original sin. He’d seen those two names written together only once, on a memorial to the dead in a village in Baden-Württemberg. He’d come across it while walking in the Black Forest, not long after he discovered who he was. Stunned that a small village could furnish such an endless list of names, all snuffed out in the camps. As he read down the columns, he’d been startled to see, nearly side by side, the name he’d been given at birth, and the later one, Gessen, from his adoptive parents. A monstrous pairing. Together in life, joined in death. After falling to his knees, he’d vomited his lunch in the dirt.

And now, the reckoning had come. A patient under his care, a talented young man with a bright future ahead of him, lay bloodied and broken at the bottom of a ravine. He had failed before to ease a patient’s suffering or to help them flourish. But not once had a patient died on his watch.