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 boy had massive internal bleeding and needed emergency vascular repair in the middle of the night, but he died on the operating table.”

A dreadful hunch gripped my chest, squeezing the air right out of my lungs.

“The clinical review board held Brian responsible for what happened, saying he’d made a critical surgical error during the emergency operation.”

Paul drew an uneven breath before he went on.

“They put him on formal suspension just before Thanksgiving, fired him in February, and sent his license to the state medical board for permanent revocation.”

Thanksgiving, of all days.