He looked for a flicker of interest in her eyes but saw none. On her left hand, he noted, she wore no ring. Though this didn’t necessarily mean anything—maybe she removed it when she saw her patients.

“I’m sending you for a scan,” she said, “but I’m ninety percent sure the tendon is ruptured.”

“Meaning?”

She shrugged. “Surgery. I won’t lie. It’s not fun. An immobilizer for eight weeks, six months to fully recover.” She smiled ruefully. “Your basketball days are over, I’m sorry to say.”

She gave him something for the pain that made him instantly sleepy. He barely awoke when they wheeled him in for the MRI. When he opened his eyes again, Lila was standing at the foot of his bed. Somebody had pulled a blanket over him. He checked his watch to find it was nearly nine P.M. He’d been at the hospital for almost six hours.

“Are your friends still here?”

“I doubt it.”

She had scheduled him for surgery at seven o’clock the next morning. There were forms to sign, and then he’d be taken to a room for the night. She asked him if there was anybody he needed to call.

“Not really.” His head was still woozy from the Vicodin. “It seems a little pathetic, I guess. I don’t even have a cat.”

She was regarding him expectantly, as if waiting for him to say something else. He was on the verge of asking her if they’d met before when she broke the silence with a sudden, shining smile.

“Well, good,” she said.

Their first date, two weeks after Wolgast’s surgery, was dinner in the hospital cafeteria. Wolgast, on crutches, his left leg entombed in an apparatus of plastic and Velcro from knee to toe, was forced to wait at the table like an invalid while she fetched their food. She was wearing scrubs—she was on call all night, she’d explained, and would be sleeping at the hospital—but she’d put on a bit of lipstick and mascara, he saw, and brushed her hair.

Lila’s family was all back east, near Boston. After med school at BU—horrible, she said, the worst four years of her life, of anyone’s life, like being dragged from a car—she’d moved to Colorado for her residency in orthopedics. She thought she’d hate it, this huge, faceless city far from home, but the opposite was true: she felt nothing but relief. The heedless sprawl of Denver, its chaotic snarl of subdivisions and freeways; the openness of the high plains and the indifferent mountains; the way people talked to each other, easily, without pretense, and the fact that nearly everyone was from somewhere else: exiles, like her.