“As of two minutes ago, in fact.

You’ll want to update your records.” And then he turned and walked toward the elevators — without asking how I was, without asking about the two babies fighting for their lives one floor away, without looking back a single time.

In the elevator, I am told, his phone buzzed.

A message from another woman, three words long: Is it done? He smiled, and typed one word back — Yes — and rode down to the lobby, and stepped into a car worth more than the house I grew up in, and pulled out into traffic believing he had just solved the central problem of his life.

A sick wife.