He did not ask how Irene was, or whether she was frightened, or what the doctors had found in her.

He looked past the crying fifteen-year-old in the corner, straight at the physician, and what he said was not a question about his child.

“I take it you found it,” Mark said.

Martha stood up.

Her pulse was loud in her own ears.

“Found what, Mark?” she said.

“What is it, then, that you think they found?”

And Mark reached into the inner breast pocket of his jacket, and drew out a folded white legal envelope stamped with the hospital’s seal, and set it down on the examination table between them, with the heavy, final motion of a man laying down a card he has been holding for far too long.