She’s fine — she caught her heel on the carpet edge.

Could you get us a luggage cart and a bottle of water?”

I sent a twenty-three-year-old away from a fifty-five-year-old woman on a floor with a known vertebral fracture history and new midline back pain, with a sentence I made up, because she asked me to.

That is the worst thing I did in two years, and I want to be precise about why it is the worst thing, because it is not the lie.

It is that up to that moment, everything I had done was managing how something looked.