Chapter 13: Surgery

I scrubbed in at six on Saturday morning, and my hands were steady.

I had decided on Thursday night, in Roxie's kitchen, that they would be.

Roxie could wait two days. The man on the table could not.

Keir was awake in the prep room when I came in, in a paper gown, with his jaw set.

"Number," he said.

"Same as Wednesday. About half."

"Good. Say it again at the end."

"I'll say whatever is true at the end."

He took my wrist in two fingers and counted.

"Your pulse is slow," he said.

"It's the only thing about me that is."

His mouth twitched. Then the anesthesiologist stepped in with the mask, and I watched his eyes close on my face.

They turned him over onto the frame, and I stood above the long pale line of his back.

The team of five went quiet around me.

"Scalpel," I said.

I opened the skin over T11 and went down through the muscle in layers.

The bone appeared white and wet under the lights.

The fragment sat where the scan said it would, a splinter the size of a grain of rice, pressing on the left side of the cord.

I eased it out with the forceps and held it up, and nobody said anything.

Then I looked at the cord itself.

The scan had shown it whole, and it was whole.

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