“Get up, Renata. We barely touched you,” my husband sneered as I lay bleeding at the bottom of the stairs—but he didn’t know about my secret phone, my hidden evidence, or the lawyer waiting for me at 8:30 the next morning.

The waiting room of the Saint Barnabas Ambulatory Care Center smelled of ozone, floor stripper, and cold coffee.

"Renata? What the hell did you do?"

Dr. Marcus Vance walked into the examination cubicle with a plastic clipboard tucked under his arm. He was sixty-one, had hands like baseball mitts, and had operated on three hundred of my post-trauma orthopedic patients over the last fifteen years. We had eaten bad cafeteria tuna sandwiches together over open charts at three in the morning. He didn't have a bedside manner because he didn't need one; he was the best hand and wrist surgeon in North Jersey.

"Distal radius," I said, pointing with my left thumb. "Comminuted. Probably dorsal displacement of about twenty degrees."

Marcus set the clipboard down on the rolling stool with a sharp rattle. He reached out and touched my fingertips. His touch was feather-light, clinical, instantly measuring temperature and turgor.

"Who did this, Ren?"

"The stairs."

"The stairs didn't give you a three-inch laceration from a blunt corner and defensive contusions on your left triceps," he said, his eyes flat behind his wire-rimmed glasses. He pulled a penlight from his pocket and clicked it into my left pupil. "And the stairs didn't hold you down while you bled."

"I need an external fixator or a plate?" I asked, ignoring the question.

Marcus stared at me for five seconds. He knew the foster-home look; his third wife had worked in the state division of youth services for twenty years. He recognized the wall when it went up.

"X-rays first. But looking at the silver-fork deformity, you’re getting a titanium volar plate and five screws. I can do it at noon between my elective carpal tunnels."

"No general anesthesia," I said. "Bier block or regional axillary. I need to be functional by two o'clock."

"You're out of your mind. You’ve got a concussion. You need twenty-four hours of observation."

"Marcus. Look at me."

He looked.

"Regional block," I repeated. "Six stitches in the scalp. A rigid fiberglass splint until you can get the hardware in tomorrow morning. I have an eight-thirty appointment in Newark that cannot be rescheduled. If you won't do it, I'll go to the county clinic on Bergen Street and let an intern set it with traction."

Marcus let out a slow, hissing breath through his teeth. "You always were the most stubborn creature that ever walked through a trauma bay."

"Eight-thirty, Marcus. The clock is running."

He stepped to the doorway and barked an order to the nurse: "Get portable imaging in here now. Wrist series and three views of the skull. And prep a suture tray with four-oh Ethilon. Move."

Forty minutes later, the needle for the lidocaine field block went into my scalp. The sting was sharp, like a wasp landing on an open sunburn, followed by that strange, cold weight of chemical numbness that made the skin feel like two-inch-thick lard.

Marcus worked quickly. His fingers were thick, but he moved the needle holder with the delicate cadence of a watchmaker.

*Push. Turn. Catch. Knot. Snip.*

"Six," he said, wiping the line with betadine. "The scar will be inside the hairline, mostly. You won't see it unless you part it on the left."

"I part it on the right," I said.

The radiologist brought the films up on the wall-mounted screen. The radius was shattered into three distinct fragments at the articular surface, with the classic dorsal tilt of an extension injury. A chunk of bone the size of a pumpkin seed was floating free in the soft tissue.

"That’s Richard," Marcus said quietly, pointing at the monitor with the tip of his scalpel handle. "Isn't it?"

I didn't answer.

"He came to the medical staff gala two years ago," Marcus continued, his voice dropping into that quiet, neutral register doctors use when delivering terminal pathology reports. "He spent twenty minutes explaining the futures market to an associate professor of pediatric cardiology, then asked me if I could get him pharmaceutical samples of Provigil for his 'productivity.' A small man in an expensive suit."

"He’s not small," I said, looking at the white bone against the black film. "He’s six-foot-two. Two hundred and ten pounds."

"He’s small, Renata. A big man doesn't need to break a woman's arm to win an argument about pills."

He reached for the roll of plaster bandage and the water basin.

"I'm putting on a temporary sugar-tong splint," he said, dipping the plaster into the warm water. "It will keep the fragments from shifting more than they already have. But you don't lift anything heavier than a pen with that left hand, and you don't move the right one at all. You understand me? If you displace that intra-articular fragment another two millimeters, you’ll never have thirty degrees of wrist extension again. You won't be able to treat patients."

"I know the anatomy, Marcus."

"Then start acting like someone who values her own hands."

He smoothed the wet plaster along the sides of my forearm, wrapping it firmly with an elastic bandage, his large hands molding the drying matrix until it stiffened against the bone like stone.

"Police report?" he asked as he cut the tape.

"Daniel Prescott is handling the filings at eight-thirty."

Marcus paused, the scissors hovering over the bandage. A faint, wolfish smile touched the corners of his graying beard. "Prescott? The Prescott from Broad Street?"

"Yes."