I want to be honest about that, because for a long time afterward people described what I did that afternoon as restraint, and it was not restraint.

Everything in me wanted to be in that hallway.

I got in front of the door because I was standing in a kitchen with a sixty-seven-year-old woman whose systolic pressure ran at 160 on a good day and who had just found out what her son was, and because I had driven her to enough appointments to know exactly what a cardiologist means when he says we watch that.

“You’re not driving,” I said.