And I looked at him — at the man I had known since we were boys, whose wedding toast I still remembered, whose children I had watched grow up, with whom I had shared four decades of a friendship I now knew had been a performance staged over my entire adult life — and I felt the grief and the horror and the disbelief settle, at last, into something clear and cold and final.

“No, Luca,” I said quietly.

“You ruined your own life the second you forgot that my oath as a surgeon applies to the people I love.” He stared at me.

And I understood, saying it, that this was the thing he had never accounted for, the single variable his four months of careful planning had failed to include.

He had chosen the perfect method, secured the perfect access, built the perfect narrative.

He had forgotten only one thing: that the doctor on rotation that night would not be a stranger.