I had not planned it.

I want to be clear about that, because in every account of this that came afterward there is an assumption that I was building something from the first minute, and the truth is that I drove to an urgent care because my daughter’s fingers had gone white and I did not know what that meant.

The woman at the desk looked at Daisy for about one second and did not ask me to fill anything in.

The physician was a woman of about forty-five named Dr.

Adaeze Mbeki.

She came in, and she looked at my daughter’s head, and then she looked at my mouth, which had stopped bleeding but had not stopped being obvious, and she sat down on the little wheeled stool and said, in a completely level voice: