The list price of that drug was just over three thousand dollars a month.

I was on a manufacturer assistance program that covered most of it and that had to be re-applied for annually, and the re-application was due in the February, and I had been thinking about that re-application every single day since the middle of September.

That is the man who opened the door on the fiftieth floor.

The office belonged to Vivienne Bramhall, who had been the chief executive of Bramhall Industrial for eleven years.

Her father had built the company out of a valve shop in Bridgeport in 1961, and at the time I am describing it did about four billion dollars of revenue a year in industrial fluid systems, and had eleven thousand employees, and its shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker BRML.

I had cleaned that office something like four hundred times.

I had never once met her.

That is not unusual; it is the entire point of the job.

The building had two hundred and nineteen people who came in before six in the morning and two hundred and eleven who left after ten at night and the two sets almost never intersected, by design, because the whole arrangement is built so that the work happens invisibly.

What I found when I opened the door was a fifty-four-year-old woman on the floor between her desk and the credenza, on her side, with her jacket off, in the middle of a thoracolumbosacral orthosis that had come partly unfastened at the anterior panel.

I need to explain why I am able to write that sentence.

I was a 68W.

Combat medic, ten years, two deployments, and after the second one I spent fourteen months at a rehabilitation facility in Texas not as a patient but as an enlisted man attached to the physical therapy service, which is where most of what I actually know came from.

I have put a TLSO brace on perhaps two hundred people.