Chapter 5: The Man Who Bought the Floor

I have delivered bad news in that corridor. I have run codes in it. I have never once seen it look like this. White peonies — my flower, the one I'd wanted and cut from the budget because Grant said peonies were "a bit much" — going into every room on the ward, crate by crate, by men in dove-grey. A quartet playing something soft by the nurses' station, which should have been absurd, and instead made two night-shift nurses cry. And at the front of it, walking down a hallway that smells...