Chapter 18: The Hearing

The hospital board met in the long room on the ninth floor, under portraits of dead surgeons.

Damian wore his navy suit.

I sat behind him with Bea on my left and my mother on my right.

She had come without being asked.

Across the aisle sat Perry in a wheelchair with a blanket on his knees.

His mother was beside him, and next to her sat a man in a three-piece suit.

That was her lawyer.

He opened the hearing by calling Damian's letter "an extraordinary admission."

He called it an attempt to bury a debt in a confession.

The chair of the board asked Damian to speak.

He stood and buttoned his jacket.

"Five years ago on March ninth, I drove home from a thirty-hour shift," he said.

"I fell asleep at the wheel on the coast road."

The room had been murmuring. It stopped.

"I struck a cyclist on the shoulder. I woke, and I thought I'd hit a pothole. I did not stop to look."

Perry's mother lifted her head.

"The cyclist was Perry Griswold."

A sound came out of her, small and high.

"The police never found the driver," Damian said. "That was me."

"I let a woman carry the lie for me, and I let the case go cold."

"I am sorry, ma'am."

She was on her feet.

"No," she said. "No, that's not..."

She turned to her son.

"Perry? You told me it was a hit and run. A stranger."

Perry kept his eyes on the blanket.

"Perry."

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