I TOOK NO notes the day Eggy fell, but I remember the alien cadence of Miranda’s voice on the message she left me and exactly where I was standing in the cold rain on East Fortieth Street. “Eggy fell at Jeff’s. She hit her head. She’s in pediatric emergency at Bellevue Hospital. They put a tube in her so she can breathe. They’re doing a CT scan.” She stopped talking then, and I heard nothing for a couple of seconds. “Erik, she’s unconscious.” Miranda didn’t say good-bye, and she didn’t ask me to come. At Jeff’s. Eggy fell at Jeff’s. As soon as I heard those words, an unformed accusation against Lane rose up in me, and the cloud of sinister possibility that had always hung about him thickened. Stalker, thief, poseur. I remembered Miranda’s bloody finger, Lane’s face in my hallway mirror as he delivered his soliloquy. I remembered the break-in, the photograph, the hammer, and my heart began to beat faster. I saw Eglantine on the floor, unconscious, saw paramedics leaning over her body as they intubated her. When I stepped into the street to hail a cab, I continued Eggy’s story in my mind, and although I knew it was irrational even to imagine an outcome until I knew more, I saw her in the ICU dead, saw a woman with a clipboard sit down beside Miranda and explain in a hushed voice about organ donation. The decision had to be made now. In the taxi, I rehearsed everything I could remember about the Glasgow Coma Scale and its relation to recovery rates, the possible impairments after head injury—seizures, cognitive deficits, memory problems, personality changes. I wasn’t an expert. Once I knew what had happened, I would call Fred Kaplan—that’s all he did, head injury day and night.

As I walked through the doors and marched down the corridor, I realized I was praying—the automatic, half-hearted prayer of a nonbeliever beseeching the lost deity of his childhood to intervene on his behalf. Please let the child live. Please let her be okay. I had walked through hospital doors hundreds of times. I had seen hundreds of patients in dire need, but one of the secrets to good care is to not empathize too much, to keep your head, to remain calm. I wasn’t calm, and it was more than alarm for Eglantine. There was rage in my step, rage in my belly and chest, and the prayer changed to a chant against Lane. Monster, bad father, shit. I strode down the hall, rhythmic fury pushing me ahead. Completely absorbed, I knocked into an old woman, who was slowly propelling herself forward in a wheelchair. I leaned down and apologized. She lifted her wizened face to mine, smiled, and said in a thick accent I couldn’t identify, “Never mind, child.”