“That’s what I said to Sully,” she said. “That I wanted to go back to the eighth grade and rethink everything.”

“You should definitely try that debutante ball thing,” he said. “I bet you’d look like a regular princess.” Then he grinned at her.

“So...is telling me now significant in some way? Meaning you trust me?”

“It’s more than that. Whatever is happening between us is growing. For me, anyway, and I think for you.” He laughed but not out of humor. “I hope you’re a patient woman because...I’m probably fucked-up. I’m wound too tight. I’m working on that.”

“What’s the prognosis?”

“That I’m determined to keep working on it until it’s fixed. At least fixed enough to have a life again.”

“Then you might not need me anymore,” she said.

“I don’t need you now, honey. It’s all want. It’s powerful want. It’s driving me forward.”

“Hmm,” she said. “So, you’re a widowed lawyer and I know your resources. You have access to court documents and you know how to research. You’ve studied my case.”

He shook his head. “I’m not going to do that. I’m not even tempted to do that, although I do want to know. But I only want to know if you want to tell me.”

She sat up a little straighter and took a deep breath. “Have you got any idea how bad the mortality rate is in neurosurgery? There was a time, when Walter started practicing, that he could face losing half his patients to brain surgery but he put his personal feelings aside and took the emotional risk for the ones he could save. It’s better now but it’s still high. The suit against me alleges that I made a bad choice in a triage situation, that I left a patient to die by not taking him to the OR immediately.”

“So the lawsuit is for malpractice?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Malpractice charges have not been filed, though there was an investigation and it’s still possible. Not likely, the investigation returned no malpractice. It’s a wrongful death suit filed by the parents of a teenager who died in the emergency room. We were in triage hell after an accident that brought five teenagers to the trauma unit. The call I made was practiced, logical and routine protocol. I took the patient who was the most critical—unconscious with an obvious epidural hematoma—to surgery and sent the conscious patient with a head injury for a CT.”

He frowned as he listened. “How do you make the call?”

“Besides experience and sound medical judgment? The ABCs—open airway, breathing, circulatory function, conscious. My patient was unconscious and he had a blown pupil, classic epidural hematoma—bleeding between the skull and brain. We had to drill holes in the skull immediately to get pressure off the brain. Another patient we pronounced; his heart was still beating but there was gray matter all over the gurney. We put him on life support for possible organ donation. The patient we sent for a CT was crying, bleeding, conscious, coherent.” She stopped talking and looked away. “He had a fatal hemorrhage before we could get him to the OR.”

“If he’d gotten to the operating room first, would he have lived?”

She shrugged. “Who knows? I can’t control everything that happens during surgery. Sometimes we get a brain bleed, a reaction to anesthesia, any number of things can go wrong. It’s always a risk. Always.”

“So a stroke was the cause of death?”

“The cause of death was five teenagers in a car traveling at a high rate of speed, lubricated by alcohol, hitting a guardrail and then a semi,” she said, almost defensively. She took a breath. “Yes. Stroke. With circumstances.”