“These hands can fix an engine in the dark. They can set a bone, stop a bleed, break a door off its hinges. And they were on the other side of the world when the one thing they were ever really for needed them.”

Chapter 12 — The Debt

It landed on me all at once, and I understood, finally, everything I had been watching for twelve hours.

He had not been fighting Sterling. He had not been fighting hospital policy or the volunteer time limit.

He had not, in the end, even been fighting the baby’s withdrawal.

He was fighting time. He was fighting a twenty-year-old ghost. He had come into my unit and found an abandoned, suffering, dying-scared little girl fighting a war she inherited and did not deserve, entirely alone, with no one in the world to hold her — and he had recognized her.

He had seen his own daughter in bed seven.