Mark
The emergency turned out to be minor in the end, a post-op patient with an irregular rhythm that settled once we adjusted his medication, but by the time I left the hospital it was nearly two in the morning, and I lay awake another hour after that thinking about a courtyard rendering and the exact moment before my phone rang when I'd been about to do something I had no business doing.
I told myself, driving home in the dark, that it had been close. That was the only word for it. Close enough that if the hospital hadn't called, I genuinely didn't know what would have happened next, and the not knowing bothered me more than I wanted to admit.
I didn't get another chance to examine it closely, because the following Tuesday brought its own complications, the kind that had nothing to do
