You Decide
I sat behind a machine for fifty minutes and made a verbatim record of a woman explaining, to about two hundred pediatricians, the healing timelines of infant fractures and the specificity of posterior rib injuries, using a set of films that were not my niece’s.
And afterward I waited by a table with a coffee urn on it for eleven minutes like a lunatic, and when the last person had finished with her I said: “Dr.
Bright.
I don’t expect you to remember me.
October 2022.
Femur and three ribs, six-month-old, the aunt with the note.”
And Dr. Halima Bright said, immediately: “Restrepo.”
I said that I had never thanked her.