Are you all right?”

And I said, “No.”

And he said, “Then that’s the only question I’m going to ask you today.

Tell me what time on Wednesday and I’ll be there Tuesday night.”

He did not ask a single question about the cremation.

Not one.

He has told me since, and it has cost him a great deal, that the thought crossed his mind on Monday afternoon and that he put it down, and that he put it down because of something he had been told in 2022 by a lawyer, which was that the two of us had to stop reacting to that family or we would never see that child again.

Which brings me to the actual answer to the question everybody asks, which is how a physician with nineteen years of practice accepted a sudden respiratory arrest in a healthy six-year-old with no history, on a telephone, at 6:40 in the morning, without asking one clinical question.