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turned his face to the woman lying on the bed, limbs arranged doll-like at her side in their casts and bandages and braces. Charlotte saw him smooth the folded edge of the thin cotton blanket that covered her torso. “She’s quite young,” he said when he came back to the desk.
    “Around forty.” She almost added, “around my age,” but it felt too personally referential—unprofessional to hint at any close identification with a patient even to someone like Otero, whom she considered a friend. As if he heard her thoughts, he smiled and looked Charlotte in the eyes. “Yes. Young. Lots to live for. Finish your note and go home to your garden. Call your boyfriend.”
    “Eric doesn’t get out of bed until ten.”
    “So, join him.” Felipe laughed at the face Charlotte made, a self-mocking grimace that summed up how she felt after being awake and working all night, her hair lank, her scrubs rumpled and smelling faintly of sweat. Felipe was twelve years older than Charlotte, his outside life consumed by one particularly wild son and a perpetually tempestuous marriage. But for four years they had shared patients and call schedules and a mutual skepticism of hospital bureaucracy, which proved to be the best possible stress relief in a job that was often all stress. Felipe had championed Eric even before Charlotte allowed herself to think about him romantically, when she was still too angry at her prior boyfriend to consider any man with a forgiving heart. Or maybe Felipe just championed love itself, found its unsteadiness a seductive twist to its pleasure—all the more alluring when success was unpredictable and thus an ideal counter to his precision in the ICU, where Charlotte could sometimes see him silently tick through all practical options for a patient, weighing hard choices against statistical odds before setting a clinical course his emotions couldn’t impeach. Sometimes she envied him that.
    She flipped through the notes she’d made about Jane Doe over the last hours, looking for any missing test or order or medication—and Jane was only one of the twelve patients she was managing, albeit the sickest. Charlotte’s eyes felt sticky and she recognized the lag between her thoughts and her decisions that always crept in after long nights. “All right. I’ll go. Come out to the nurses station and let’s go over the charts.”
    —
    She called Otero twice on the way home, remembering details she hadn’t outright talked about even though she knew he’d handle them: remind the echo tech to look for a septal defect in Jane’s heart, get a surgical consult for her trach, make sure Infectious Disease sees her first thing today. It could be endless, this mental circling she did around complex cases, knowing how drastically things could change in one day. She stopped at Whole Foods for cat food, yogurt, and some fruit but left with an enormous frosted cinnamon roll—somehow they almost looked healthy sitting on their tidy brown paper squares in a wicker basket. She thought about driving to Swansons Nursery for more lettuce starts. She thought about going straight to Eric’s but decided to rent a George Clooney DVD instead, then circled the parking lot of the video store twice and decided to go home without stopping. The fog of fatigue, an entire, sparkling afternoon ahead with no obligations, it left her aimlessly wandering through a boggling plethora of options. She needed more hobbies, she thought. She needed sleep.
    Puck, the tiny gray kitten rescued from a Dumpster and now grown into an enormous, belligerent hair ball, stood on his hind paws clawing at the glass door and pushed between Charlotte’s legs before she’d even stepped into the kitchen. She dropped her purse and groceries on the table and opened the first section of the newspaper while she finished the cinnamon roll. She should sleep now, she knew, let her brain reorder itself so she could get something accomplished later. But the sun looked so