Stephen Wright examined her — checked her head, her eyes, her reflexes, her breathing, everything, with the unhurried thoroughness that is either the most reassuring thing in the world or the most terrifying, depending on what he finds.

I could not read his face.

I stood at the edge of the bay with my arms wrapped around myself and I made every bargain a person makes in a hallway like that, promising anything, everything, if she was only all right.

A nurse brought me a chair I did not sit in.

Time did the strange thing it does in emergency rooms, stretching and folding, so that the twenty minutes felt like a night.

And the whole time, underneath the fear for Rosie, a second understanding was assembling itself in me, cold and quiet and permanent: that this had happened because I had stayed.