“Tomorrow I’m on the other side of the desk.”

I stood in that room and did the arithmetic on his hands.

Because his hands shook.

They had shaken for months.

They shook around a coffee cup in November and they shook on a clipboard in December and I had a complete, satisfying, medically accurate explanation for every single tremor I ever saw in that man, and I had applied it automatically, every time, without once considering an alternative.

And on the twelfth of December he sat next to me on a plastic chair, wiping his palms on his jeans, in a building where he had worked for twenty-eight years, about to be married for the first time at seventy-one.