I showed up at the hospital to surprise my husband during his shift. But the second one of his coworkers saw me, all the color left his face. Then his eyes filled with tears. “He hasn’t said a word to you, has he?” Ben and I had been married eleven years, and for every one of those years, I had shared him with the hospital. He was a remarkably gifted surgeon.

The chief of pediatric surgery, Dr.

Gregory Walsh, had taken the emergency case himself because he was the senior attending on duty.

Gregory had brought Brian to the hospital ten years earlier, supervised his fellowship, and raised a toast to us at our wedding reception.

At two thirty that morning, a panicked circulating nurse called Brian at home, begging him to hurry into operating room three.

Dr.