Six-forty-five the next morning, OR-2.
A woman, sixty-three, emergency thoracic repair. She came in at five AM with a dissecting aortic aneurysm — the kind of thing that kills people before they reach the hospital, more often than not. She did not die before reaching the hospital. She is not going to die in this OR.
Gideon's hands are steady.
They are always steady. This is the thing his colleagues never quite get used to, no matter how long they work with him — the absolute, eerie stillness of his hands under pressure. There is a resident rotating through this month who keeps watching them during critical moments, the way someone watches a tightrope walker, waiting for the wobble that never comes.
There is no wobble.
The repair takes four hours and six minutes. When he closes, it is clean — each suture placed with the precision of a man who does not permit himself the luxury of approximation.
He scrubs out. Nadia passes him in the corridor and falls into step beside him for thirty seconds.
"You were in at six-fifteen," she says.
"Forty-five."
"Right. So you've been here since—"
"Nadia."
"I'm just saying."
"Don't."
She peels off toward the pediatric ward. He keeps walking.
In the break room, he pours himself coffee from the machine she has identified as the good one. He sits at the table in the corner, the one with the wobbly leg, the one nobody else ever chooses. He wraps both hands around the mug. Steady. Perfectly steady.
Last night is in a sealed compartment. It is the same compartment that holds the night before and the night before that and every night like this one going back two years. He is very good at the sealing.
A nurse comes in, says good morning, does not look at him twice. He is not remarkable to her. Just Dr. Vale, sitting with his coffee, looking out the window at the parking structure.
She makes her coffee and leaves.
Gideon sits with the mug for another ten minutes. He thinks about the sixty-three-year-old woman in recovery whose heart is beating because of what his hands did this morning.
He does not think about Leon Grant.
He is very good at this