Beside him was a tall man in a white coat, a stethoscope slung around his neck, an ID that read Dr.

Fairbank. They were not talking about her heart.

They were talking about money, in the low, careful voices of people finishing a deal — and as I stood there in the dark with the smell of iodine and clean linen around me, the frantic daughter who had run through that building began, quietly, to die, and something colder took her place.

Chapter 4 — The Cut