Under the lace, along the left side of Emily’s neck, under a heavy layer of cosmetic that had been applied in a shade slightly darker than the rest of her face, there was bruising.

Margaret did not need more than a second and a half.

She had seen it before.

In an emergency department you see it perhaps four or five times a year, and after thirty-one years it is not something you have to think about — the discoloration in a band rather than a patch, the small oval marks above and beside it, and the fine dark speckling in the skin over the jaw that is not a bruise at all and that has a name she had used a hundred times in a hundred charts.

She heard herself say, out loud, in a completely normal professional voice, to nobody:

“That’s petechiae.”