Your mother is not dying.

Listen at the door for a minute, and you’ll understand why I stopped you.” She did not promise me a revelation on a timer.

She just looked sick about what she knew, and stepped back, and let me put my face near the gap in the door.

I have thought about Kathleen a great deal since.

She had no reason to stop me.

It would have been easier, and far safer for her, to take her vitals and finish her shift and let whatever was happening in room 412 be someone else’s problem — to tell herself, as most of us tell ourselves a hundred times a day, that it wasn’t her business.