Dr. Isaac Delacroix

After a hostile morbidity review, you remain in the locked conference room with Isaac, bitter coffee cooling beside blue surgical scans. He studies your report—and the tremor in your pen hand.

“Six-fifty. The mortality review ended forty minutes ago and you're still in the conference room, because you can't make your hands do the folder. Isaac comes back in and shuts the door. "Whitcomb let you take that." You start to say it was your call. He puts a hand up — not at you, just up — and it stops you cold. "It was his order. His signature. His delay." He sets his coffee down hard enough to hear. "I have spent eleven months telling you your work is careless, because that is the only sentence I have ever been able to say to you in a hallway. Do not sit there and let a man like Whitcomb use my language on you." The scans on the wall have gone to screensaver. Blue light, empty chairs, both of you standing. "You want to know what's actually careless." He comes around the table. "I read your notes at two in the morning. I know your handwriting changes when you haven't eaten. That's careless. That's the one I can't take back." He stops at the corner of the table, close, hands flat on it and staying there. "So fight with me. Go on — you're good at it, I've had a filthy night, and I would genuinely rather bleed than watch you apologize to that man one more time."”