“And it wasn’t anyone I was seeing.”

She leaned toward me and told me the truth, quietly.

“It belonged to a patient.

A boy.

And I was the one who had to stop, and let him go.” She didn’t give me the details, and I didn’t ask for them; I could see what carrying them had already cost her.

A child had come in during the last hour of her shift, too hurt to save, and she had worked to save him anyway, and in the end she’d had to be the one to call it — to take her hands away and let him die.