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“Me.”

“Always you. Nothing happens before your three. That rule hasn’t changed since the first day, and it never will.”

He picks Bruce up and sets him in his lap, and he walks the dinosaur through it while Rosa opens the kit. Clean gets narrated. Poke gets a warning delivered into a plastic ear. When the needle goes in, Milo counts for himself with three fingers raised, voice steady until the last number, and then it’s over, and he checks the dinosaur’s chest before his own.

“Bruce did okay,” he decides.

“Bruce had a great teacher.” The flush goes in, and he makes the saline face, and Rosa hands him apple juice before he can complain about the taste. I initial the time on the board.

His mother catches my eye and presses her hand flat over her heart. I nod once and keep moving, because if I stay for gratitude, I’ll run late for the rest of my list, and the list is long on a Wednesday.

The admission arrives on time. Theo, four years old, a mass on the left kidney found by an urgent-care ultrasound over the weekend. His parents stand on either side of the bed in their coats, still zipped, and Theo drives a toy ambulance up the bed rail, unbothered.

I introduce myself to him first. Handshake, very formal. He allows it. Then I turn to the coats.

“Here’s what today is,” I tell them. “Today is pictures and blood work. Nobody does anything to Theo today besides one poke, and he’ll have cream on first, so it’s a boring poke. Tomorrow we’ll sit down with the pictures, and I’ll draw you what I see, and you can ask me every question twice. Write them down tonight when they come to you at three in the morning, because they will.”

The mother pulls a receipt from her coat pocket and smooths it flat, ready to start the list now. Her husband takes out a pen and hands it to her without being asked. That’s a couple who will get through this. I add a note to my sign-out that this family listens best on paper.

Adeline finds me in the break room with a green shake in one hand and her gym bag still on her shoulder. She’s tall and fit—every workout shows. She trains on her lunch hour and comes back smelling of the eucalyptus towels they stock downstairs. Her dark skin glows even under fluorescent breakroom lights. It’s not fair.

But then again, life’s not fair. I’m eating last night’s tacos cold at the little table, and she struts in here like a goddess.

Adeline drops into the other chair and helps herself to a chip from my bag without a word about it. “Pruitt cornered me by the scanner. Asked if you were ready for tomorrow.”

“Pruitt asked you?”

“She asks everyone around you. It’s her version of asking you.” Adeline pries the lid off the shake. “She said high visibility. Then she said natural successor, and then she looked at me over her glasses until I agreed to repeat all of it.”

“Consider it repeated.”

“Department head, Veda. She’s retiring inside two years, and she’s building her short list now. The keynote is your audition. You have to know this.”

“The keynote is forty minutes of maintenance-phase outcomes.” I fold the chip bag over. “Response rates, adherence, what those two years of pills actually ask of a family. I wrote that talk twice and know it cold. I could give it in my sleep.”

“You did. At my birthday, after the second pitcher of margaritas, you gave us the survival curves with hand gestures.”

“Was I good?”

“You were spectacular. There were four of us, and you knew all our names, so you were comfortable.” She points the straw at me. “Tomorrow there are four hundred, and you won’t know any of them, and that’s the entire problem, isn’t it?”

I look at the folded bag in my hands. At a bedside, I can find the one sentence a scared sixteen-year-old needs. Behind a podium, my own heartbeat gets loud enough to compete with the microphone.

“I can write you a propranolol in four seconds,” Adeline says. “Half the speakers there will be on it.”

“I’m not medicating for a slideshow.”

“Then eat a real dinner, hydrate, and land the first minute. That’s all it takes. After the first minute, it’s just a very large bedside, and that’s where you’re best.” She stands, shoulders the bag, and taps the table twice on her way out. “Text me when you finish rehearsing. Not before.”

The door swings shut behind her. I throw the bag away and go back to the floor.

Home is a distant memory most days. My building’s stairwell carries the neighbors’ fried onions up all three flights, and my apartment is dark until I hit the lamp by the piano. The suit for tomorrow hangs on the closet door where I left it, deep green, pressed, chosen by Adeline in a fitting room where she overruled me twice and was right both times.

Adeline is always right. It’d be annoying if she wasn’t also kind, clever, and supportive.

Dinner is eggs because eggs require nothing from me. Cabernet or pinot grigio? What goes best with eggs? The cab. Probably.

At the piano, I give myself two minutes of scales. My hands learned them at eight years old and have never lost them, and the pattern empties everything else out through my fingers. Two minutes, no more. Then I carry the wine into the bathroom, set my phone on the shelf with the timer ready, and face the mirror.