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to move out of the house. Amy called it “The Charlie and Cathy Show,” and she tuned in nightly. Eventually, she reciprocated with confessions of her own.
    Each night, Charlie would zip through his responsibilities with patients and then cruise the block of rooms until he found her. Amy was a procrastinator, always running late, and she appreciated his technical proficiency, born of fourteen years’ experience 10 at nine other hospitals. Soon, she came to rely on it. Her position at Somerset was the best Amy had held in her nearly fifteen years of nursing. The $20,000 bonus on salary for a seven-month contract plus $1,700 a month for local lodging was “crazy money.” She wanted to keep it, even if it was killing her.

    M idshift that October, Charlie found her listing against the hard white wall of the nurses’ station. He helped her to an empty room and shut the door. Amy sat on the bed, gasping for air until she could explain. It was a funny story, at least to the gallows sensibilities of a veteran nurse; she was working in one of the nation’s top cardiac care units, and secretly, slowly, dying of heart failure.
    Amy had diagnosed it herself as advanced atrial fibrillation brought on by prolonged chronic sick sinus syndrome. The condition was at least partially responsible for her crippling panic attacks and the reason those attacks were so unsettling. The synaptic wiring in her heart muscle was misfiring. The result was an erratic heart rhythm insufficient to cycle oxygenated blood between her lungs and her body. Amy was drowning in her own stagnant bloodstream. The most logical medical explanation was that her heart muscle had been ravaged by a virus from one of her patients, but Amy wondered if perhaps it was something more mystical: an emotionalvirus of some kind, psychological shrapnel from the monsters of her childhood, the damage of memory. Amy’s failing heart wasn’t the only secret in her life. Those were killing her, too.
    Charlie listened, nodding like a doctor. Then he left the room, returning a minute later with a mint-green oval in his palm—diltiazem, 0.5 mg. Amy popped the pill and pulled herself upright with an empty IV tree. It was just 2 a.m., and she still had work to do.
    “No, listen,” Charlie told her. “You rest. Doctor’s orders.” He gave her the hint of a smile. “I’ll handle your patients tonight.”
    “Charlie…,” Amy started.
    “Don’t worry,” Charlie said, turning to leave. “I can keep a secret.”

    C harlie never knew how many he did at Somerset, only that it started around when Amy got sick, and once it started it did not stop.
    Amy’s cardiomyopathy went unchecked until February, when she collapsed at work and was rushed to the ER. She would require a pacemaker and a leave of absence. Charlie was alone on the overnight. He replaced her attentions with his own compulsions.
    The specific ones, the very old, the very sick, the memorable, seemed to begin mid-January 11 with digoxin and a sixty-year-old housewife named Elanor Stoecker. Two weeks later, Charlie worked the night of his forty-third birthday, and used Pavulon, a strong paralytic similar to vec. It was an effective drug by itself, but Charlie had incorporated it with others, and at the end of the night he wasn’t exactly sure who had died as a result of his actions, nor what, precisely, had killed Joyce Mangini and Giacomino Toto. He was, however, quite certain that it was norepinephrine which blew out John Shanagher’s heart on March 11. As he worked the code, Charlie’s knowledge of which drugs might reverse the old man’s sudden failure seemed, to the other nurses, almost magically prescient. Even the young residents on call stepped back to let Charlie take charge. His reputation as a code genius grew, and by the time Dorthea Hoagland’s hammering heart stopped beating and Code Blue bleated through the speakers that May, Charlie once again seemed to have the answers. Each patient had complex