her water and medicine and whisper-coaxing her to take it. Of staying and staying, until she was better again.
“Let me take you inside. Look you over.” He winced inwardly. Why didn’t he add a Dr. Taylor wink, to really creep her out? “Or I’ll take you somewhere. A doc-in-the-box, or wherever you want to go.”
She shook her head miserably, her shoulders sagging.
Baby, he wanted to say, which made no sense.
“Nora,” he said instead, injecting every ounce of sternness he could into her name.
She looked up at him, her swollen eyes even wetter than before. “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t go anywhere with you.”
Her chin quivered, and his heart cracked.
“I think I’m allergic to the kittens,” she said, and then she burst into tears.
When Will was in his third year of medical school, he spent four weeks on a family medicine rotation in small-town Wisconsin, long days stuffing himself in the same exam room over and over again with the physician, the patient, and whatever family members had come along. The office had one nurse and no receptionist, minimal equipment, and temperamental internet service, and while he was there, he learned more about medicine than he had from any classroom or clinical experience before or after. Over the course of her days—most of which clocked in at around eleven hours—Dr. Calhoun saw everything from pink eye to prostate cancer. She didn’t just know everyone’s health history; she also knew the names of their kids and their pets. Her tiny office constantly looked like a bomb full of paper had gone off in it, she never had a pen when she needed it, and the maddest she ever got at Will was on a day three weeks in—right when he was starting to feel loose, confident—after he’d seen a patient for a minor cooking burn.
“Never heard somebody whine so much,” he’d said, when the guy had finally left the office, a bandage around his arm that was more about placation than treatment.
Dr. Calhoun had turned on him with the kind of speed he’d started to think, from the slow way she moved throughout the day, was impossible.
“I know you did not say a patient whined,” she’d snapped, and then she’d read him a riot act he’d never really forgotten: about pain and perspective, about fear and loneliness, about respect and empathy and kindness. At the time, Will had thought he’d already known all about those things, had thought that losing his parents the way he had had taught him what he needed to know.
But Dr. Calhoun had taught him that every patient—even the ones with minor cooking burns and a penchant for exaggeration—deserved the same kind of empathetic care as someone with a traumatic injury, or a chronic illness, or a life-threatening condition.
Nora Clarke, though. Will thought Nora Clarke with an acute sinus infection brought on by allergies might even test the limits of Dr. Calhoun’s patience.
“I don’t want to,” she said from her fussy, flower-upholstered couch, her legs tucked up underneath her.
Will ignored her, because this was about the tenth time he’d heard her say a version of this sentence in the half hour since he’d come up to her place, out of breath from the frantic, terrified twenty minutes he’d spent after she’d covered her tear-streaked face and fled from him. A few barked instructions—for someone to go up and check on her, for Sally to take the kittens, for the photographer to put his goddamned camera away—had been followed by the hottest, most aggressively scrubbing shower Will could stand, a change into an extra, cat-danderless set of clothes he’d had in his car, and a dead run up the steps to Nora’s apartment.
“I don’t want you to come in,” she’d said, at first, her voice still tear-soaked, but Marian, for once, had taken Will’s side and opened the door to him, and then she’d shouted at Nora that she’d needed a doctor for two days, and “this one’s probably as good as any.”
Once he was in, Nora had given him a whole host of pouting do not wants—to get checked over, by either him or someone else, to have her temperature taken, to have her nasal passages examined, to take Tylenol, to drink water, to sit down. Every time, it was pretty toothless; he could tell that she was the kind of sick where simply every single thing felt bad, even the things that were meant to make her better. Between him and Marian—who’d only left a few