And it does not work on a hospital eighty-one miles away in a different county with its own compliance department and its own general counsel and its own extremely serious feelings about anybody phoning them to discuss a chart.

Every single thing that brought that family down was outside a hundred-mile radius or outside their line of sight, and I did not do that on purpose in the first week.

I did it because I was standing in Tyler and I did not know anybody.

I was married into that family for six years.

I lived in that county for four of them.

And I never once understood, until my daughter was on a couch for six hours, that the thing I had thought was a large family with a lot of money was actually a closed system that had never in fifty years been made to explain itself to anybody who did not need something from it.