Chapter 10: Grand Rounds

I read it twice in the gray light.

Then I put the phone face down on his nightstand and lay there with my heart going.

Tate woke up because I'd stopped breathing normally.

"What," he said into the pillow.

I handed it to him.

He read it with one eye open. Then both.

He sat up so fast he grabbed his shoulder and swore.

"He failed you."

"He removed me. Then he failed me."

"For me."

"For the truck photo. He sent it at six a.m. sharp. He wanted me to see it first thing."

Tate put the phone down very carefully.

"I'll go to the school. I'll tell them I'm not your patient. I've never been your patient."

"You're his patient. In his building. That's his whole argument."

"Then what do we do?"

I looked at the ceiling. At the old brick. At the long crack running through the plaster.

"I need a letter from this rotation to match into orthopedics," I said. "Without it I'm a third-year with a fail and a referral. Nobody's taking me."

"Lainey."

"So I've got nothing to protect anymore." I turned my head on his pillow. "That's actually kind of freeing."

He looked at me.

"What are you going to do?"

"Go to class."

Dunne's grand rounds was the next Wednesday at noon, in the big auditorium at the medical school.

The flyer had been up for a month. His face, his teeth, a hockey stick.

Return to Play: Keeping the Elite Athlete on the Ice.

Gemma walked me in.

"You're sure," she said.

"No."

"Good. Sure people are boring."

The auditorium held two hundred. It was full.

Attendings in the front rows. Residents in the middle. Students up in the back with their lunches on their knees.

The straight-teeth resident was in the third row, right on the aisle.

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