Chapter 17: What He Would Give

The resignation letter was one paragraph long, and Gabe had rewritten it a dozen times.

He sat at the kitchen table on Wednesday afternoon with his glasses pushed up into his hair and the laptop open in front of him.

Eli was at the archive until six.

The house was quiet, and Gabe had never found it so loud.

I am writing to resign my position as lead of the residency teaching group, effective at the chair's convenience.

He read it again.

Thirteen years he had run that group.

He had written the curriculum himself, on this table, and he knew every resident who had passed through it by the way they held a stethoscope.

His name was on a brass plate outside the teaching room.

He found that he would give all of it.

He would give the plate, the post and the good opinion of the board, if it meant Kessling could not stand in a hallway and say Eli's name as a case.

He printed the letter and did not send it.

At nine he knocked on Tom's door, two doors down.

Eli came with him, with his hair still damp from the shower and his hand wrapped in Gabe's.

Gabe had been holding it for the whole walk.

Tom's apartment was small and cluttered with stacks of textbooks and one sad fern.

A young man sat on the edge of the couch with his elbows on his knees.

He wore scrubs, and he had not slept since the weekend.

Gabe knew him.

A second-year, quiet, one of the best hands in the group.

"This is the resident who filmed it," Tom said. "He wants to tell you himself."

"Dr. Kelleher," the young man said. "I'm so sorry."

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