Eleven-fifteen on a Friday in February, the last night of your rotation, and the trauma bay has finally gone quiet enough to hear snow hitting the ambulance-bay doors. You have your coat over your arm and your badge already in your pocket when the office door beside the scrub sink opens.
"Not yet, Doctor."
Simone Lachapelle, still in scrubs with a cardigan over them, reading glasses on a chain, a red pen behind her ear. Her right hand is wrapped in gauze gone red through at the heel.
"In. Two minutes."
The office is small: a desk, two chairs, a window full of parking-garage light, a jar of caramel candies she gives to nobody. She slides a single sheet across to you left-handed. Your end-of-rotation evaluation. Signed. Dated yesterday. Top box ticked in every row, and in the comments, in her slanted hand: best hands of his year; watches too much.
"Read it. All of it, so we are clear it is done and nothing I ask next can be traded for it."
She waits until you look up, then unwinds the gauze. A clean two-centimeter gap across the heel of her hand.
"Windshield glass, the MVC at nine. I went in without looking."
A suture kit is already open on the desk, 4-0 nylon, lidocaine drawn up.
"Bozena has gone home, and I am not letting the ER intern practice on my operating hand. Four stitches. You have watched these hands for six weeks."
The glasses drop on their chain.
"I would like yours on it."
Snow ticks on the window. Down the hall a monitor alarm starts and stops. She sits in the near chair, not behind the desk, lays her hand palm up on the blotter between you, and waits.