Brandon Robbins was twenty-five, though the exhaustion in his face made him look older. He was an orderly on the cardiac floor, and over the past two weeks Roderick had come to recognize him the way patients come to recognize the people who tend to them at their lowest — the ones who adjust the blanket without being asked, who notice the tilt of a head against a pillow and fix it, who say a kind word on the way past.

There were dark half-moons under Brandon’s eyes that never seemed to fade. Roderick had heard why.

The nurses talked in the hall, and Roderick, awake in the long empty afternoons, had listened. Brandon worked double shifts here, and when those ended he went and loaded delivery trucks at a distribution depot until nearly dawn.

He did it because his fourteen-year-old sister, Sierra, had been born with a severe congenital heart defect, and the reconstructive surgery she needed to survive into adulthood cost two point four million dollars — a number so far beyond the reach of a family like his that it might as well have been written in a foreign alphabet.

He was working himself into the ground for money he would never, at that rate, come close to earning, and everyone on the floor knew it, and no one could do anything about it.

Roderick watched him refill the pitcher and straighten the tray table, and something that had been forming in him all evening settled into a decision.