It was the sound of her husband speaking of their son as an obstacle to be stepped over.

She felt the doctor move toward the machines, heard the small clatter of a tray.

And she understood that whatever will she had left, she was no longer summoning it for her own sake.

She was summoning it for Sam.

This was the part, she would realize afterward, where the whole thing had almost ended in the dark with no one the wiser — three people around a bed at two in the morning, a doctor with a shaking hand, a plan disguised as a medical event, and a woman who could hear all of it and do nothing.

If it had gone the way Chandler intended, there would have been no crime for anyone to find.