I don’t diagnose from an exam table. But I have felt that particular thing under my own hands enough times to know what I’m about to order films for.

I sent Zaya out to the front desk with Denise and a sticker, and I sat down with Andre and told him she needed an X-ray today and an MRI this week and a pediatric orthopedic oncology referral at the children’s hospital regardless of what the films showed, because that’s what you do and you don’t wait.

Andre Boone is forty-one and does HVAC repair. He had his hands folded and he was very calm.

And he said, “How much?”

I want to tell you what happened in my body, because it is the entire point of this chapter and I am not going to make myself look better than I was.

I was thirteen years old in Room 314. Instantly. Completely. Paper gown, feet not reaching the floor, the smell of that plug-in lavender. *You’re telling me I have to drain a hundred grand because she got sick?*