Trying to rise above the tumultuous demands from her body that she drown herself in a hot tub and a bottle of wine, she lets the night settle into the pores of her skin, breathes serene darkness as far into her lungs as they will allow without making her start hacking again. Sipping water, she observes waves of terror and violence breaking inside her, chilling her breastbone, prickling her scalp, tightening her throat.

Adventure costs more than it used to. Or maybe the price is just paid in a different currency.

Karma is. Is. That is fact.

This night Rose has created a mountain of the stuff, broken it into a million pebbles, and thrown them into a million ponds. Reverberations trembling through her, the nurse, Mel, Chuck, the candy striper. Like the red light flashing from the silent alarm, waves will go out and out, touching more lives: Daniel, Flynn, Marion.

In every city and town, on every continent, others are also mindlessly dumping avalanches of rock into billions of ponds. Rose can feel the waves gathering into a tsunami, a global panic attack.

The First Noble Truth: There is suffering.

As far as Rose can see, the storm of suffering she has been blown into, and is madly contributing to, is nowhere near over.

Would it stop if she went back to the Longwood MCU and let whatever they were doing to her be done? In the plus column, they would stop sending knifemen after her. Mel would no longer be drawn into night ops to save poor Gigi’s wrinkled old posterior.

Of course, Rose would be drugged to the gills and “probably wouldn’t last out the week.”

Would the world be better or worse off if she went gently into her next life as a vole or a banana slug? Mel would mourn, bless her, but she’d be alive to do it.

Or not.

Rose isn’t the only sentient being setting potentially deadly forces in action. Maybe she can stop her part of the ride, but Longwood will continue to do whatever it is they are doing, racking up a karmic debt that makes hers seem paltry by comparison.

Rose is not important enough to be drugged and murdered for her own sake. There is a profit motive somewhere, either to an individual or the institution. If it is profitable to hasten one little old lady into that good night, it will be ever so much more profitable to hasten a dozen, or a score.

Follow the money. Everybody says that. Rose can’t fathom where the money is, let alone track it. To Longwood, she is worth seven grand a month on the hoof, if she is alive, but Longwood has a waiting line. What with the baby boomers beginning to lose their collective marbles, dementia care is a seller’s market.