Archive of Our Own

The first time the nurse tried to give Dr. Benton the news, he was sure he couldn’t possibly have heard her correctly.

“What was that?” He asked, his attention still buried in the routine appendectomy he was currently closing on.

“I said, we need to clear the O.R.,” she repeated. “There was a stabbing downstairs. A patient attacked one of the ER residents and a medical student.”

An ER resident?

Peter blinked and stopped. “Who was it?”

“Just some patient on a psych hold. It doesn’t say more than that,” she told him, frowning down at the emergency memo that had been sent up as if this would force it to reveal its hidden secrets.

“No. I meant, who was it that was stabbed?” He corrected urgently, suddenly feeling very cold, a deep pit forming in his stomach.

“Um, Lucy Knight,” the nurse read aloud while Peter prayed that her next words would not be, “and Dr. Carter.”

Everything around him stopped; the forceps and needle driver fell out of his rapidly numbing fingers, and a metallic clanging rang out as they hit the surgical tray and ricocheted down to the linoleum floor. Peter’s eyes met Anspaugh’s, and they shared a shellshocked look.

This couldn’t be real. Someone must have heard something wrong. It couldn’t be Carter, it just couldn’t be. And anyway, there was security downstairs. Weren’t they supposed to stop things like this from happening? It just wasn’t possible.

“I…” He couldn’t seem to find his words. “I-I should…”

Anspaugh nodded solemnly. “I’ll finish up here and get the room turned around for him. Bring him up as soon as he’s stable.”

Peter tried to move his feet but found himself paralyzed. His head was reeling.

Seeing this, Anspaugh shouted, “Go!” at him, and the shock was just enough to snap Peter back into his body.

He didn’t have time for this. If what he’d been told was correct, there was no time to waste. Carter needed him.

Running, he tore off his surgical gown and fled down the stairs. He pulled on a pair of latex gloves as he went and quickly rounded each maze-like corner of the infernally laid out emergency department, even pushing past an armed police officer as he ran, until he finally reached Trauma One and pushed the doors open.

“Is he conscious!?”

It was chaos inside. Admittedly, it was never exactly calm down here, but Kovac and Chen were already working frantically when Peter arrived. There was blood everywhere he looked. They all turned to acknowledge him, but only briefly before turning back to the wounded resident lying on their table. The port had been correct. It was Carter and he looked so small and fragile in this moment, like he was already breaking apart.

“No, but he is responding to fluid resuscitation,” Kovac told him.

Chen seemed to be trying to explain things to him, but Peter’s imagination already had him thinking ten steps ahead to all the worst-case scenarios possible.

“Roll him, let me see!” he ordered, and a rush of hands reached in to help tilt Carter’s motionless body to the side. An ugly red gash was cut into his back, and the location and blood pouring out of it made even Peter’s seasoned surgical stomach churn. “Oh man…”

Alarms were sounding all around them as they worked, and it was difficult not to get caught up in the complete devastation of this situation.

“His toes went down, which means no damage to the spinal cord,” Kovac reported after one of the nurses tested for the Babinski reflex.

Haleh burst in through the connecting door behind Dr. Benton from Trauma Two and tried to grab his attention, but he was far too fixated on the bloodied boy in front of him to hear any of it.

“Absent bowel sounds, probably got the descending colon,” Peter added, his stethoscope plugged into his ears and pressed against Carter’s abdomen for examination.

His mind was already rushing to think of all the possible surgical complications and opportunities for infection that came with a bowel perforation when Haleh spoke up again, more commandingly telling him that Weaver needed him urgently to put in a trach for Lucy in the next room over. He didn’t want to leave Carter like this, but he knew his duties as a surgeon and could see that things were dire for everyone involved.

“Book an O.R. and prepare to send Carter up,” he barked out to the room, throwing down his implements and pushing open the doors to go assist Weaver.

Once on the other side, he worked diligently but couldn’t seem to fully separate his thoughts from Carter next door. Peter had known him since he was a little know-nothing medical student in a tailored white coat and had taught him and watched him grow every day since then. He’d never have admitted it to Carter out loud before, but he thought of them as connected in a way. So connected in fact that Peter knew he had been overly hard on Carter when he’d switched his residency from surgery to emergency medicine without speaking to him first. It had been hurtful that he’d snuck around behind Peter’s back to leave, and Peter had reacted accordingly, but even he could see that Carter shone as a medical doctor in ways that he just wouldn’t have been able to as a surgeon.

He was really going to be an amazing doctor one day, Peter was sure of it.

If things turned out okay today, he’d finally tell the poor little rich kid what he felt–he promised himself that deep in his heart. And knowing Carter, he’d want to throw a party or something when Peter finally came clean and would definitely give that big dopey grin of his and become entirely too annoying about it to stand. Peter looked forward to that immensely.

There was a scream of pain from next door, and Peter looked up to see Carter’s body arching in agony, but his eyes had opened and were gazing over now to see Lucy in an even more precarious position than him. The look on his pale and diaphoretic face broke Peter’s heart.

That expression was enough to remind Peter that, while Carter was his student, Lucy was Carter’s and that meant he owed it to Carter to turn his full attention back to the girl on his table and put everything he had to give into saving her life.

He turned his back, dedicated to doing this as best he could, but could hear the rumble of desperate voices through he door and was soon grabbed again from behind. It was Chen, and she was shaking him while he tried to at least finish the task he had started on Lucy, but she just kept repeating over and over again with increasing urgency each time, “Dr. Benton, we need you!”

When he finally turned to look at her, she was practically in tears.

“Carter’s got a bad renal lac. Foley output is bright red.”

She didn’t need to explain how dangerous that could be to him, and Peter felt his heart pound a hard beat. Shit. He’d just committed himself to saving Lucy, but if what Chen was saying was true–and he knew it was–Carter was in more urgent danger and needed to go up for surgery now.

No sooner than he had confirmed another surgeon was coming that could finish up on Lucy, he returned to Carter’s side with adrenaline in his wake. Kovac, Chen, and him all worked quickly to prepare Carter to move and took off, pushing the gurney out of the trauma room and towards the elevators up to the O.R.

Carter was awake still but barely, eyes staring up woozily at the ceiling as they ran with the loss of blood evident in the pallor of his pasty skin.

“I want you to stay awake, John,” Chen tried to speak to him, her voice cracking in pain. “I want you to stay awake until we get you up there. You hear me?”

The two of them had been medical students together and had known each other for a long time. Peter knew just how she felt in this moment, even if his exterior probably wasn’t showing it in quite the same way.

“Come on, Carter. Stay with me,” Peter agreed, helping the bed turn into the lobby where an elevator was waiting to take them up.

Corday and Green appeared like ghosts in the night, asking questions and seeing where they could help, but Peter could only focus on making sure Carter stayed moving and was under the knife as soon as humanly possible.

“Kerry needs you, I’ve got this,” he shouted back at them dismissively as the elevator doors closed, desperate to be able to focus all of his attention on his task at hand. Carter’s clothes were soaked through, and his eyes had taken on a vacant sort of stare that wasn’t quite able to focus on anything in particular. He was losing too much blood.

It was a rush from the second the doors opened again on the surgical floor to push the bed into the O.R. and begin the preparations to operate. Anspaugh came in just as soon as they’d arrived, ready to begin, just as Peter was arguing with one of the nurses about the type of blood stocked in the room.

“This is O-neg, I asked for type-specific,” he snapped, holding a surgical mask loosely up to his face. O-negative blood was fine in emergency situations where a true type match couldn’t be guaranteed in time, but the prognostic outlook was better if they had Carter’s exact blood type ready to go. This wasn’t something he was willing to compromise on.

“He is O-negative,” she told him, certainly, confirming that she had heard his instructions and had acted accordingly.

There was some relief in knowing that a mistake had not already been made, and they had all the right tools here to do their best work in saving Carter’s life. However, an uncharacteristically sentimental part of Benton also became fixated on the fact that, of all the possible permutations of blood types out there, John Carter was naturally O-negative–a universal donor, capable of giving everything he had to everyone who would take it.

For today, in this moment, though, Benton deeply wished Carter would choose to be selfish just this one time and live no matter what it meant for anyone else.

“How many units is that?” Carter’s voice asked weakly as another blood bag was hung in anticipation of the operation.

Benton looked down, surprised the kid still had the strength to speak at all.

“That’s five, but you shouldn’t be counting,” he scolded softly.

He needed to be saving his energy at a time like this, not worrying about the lengths it was taking to keep him alive.

“That’s bad, isn’t it?”

“We’re having problems keeping your crit up, but that’s from the renal lac,” he explained gently, even though he knew Carter had to be aware of all of this already.

The anesthesiologist cut in to begin administering Versed ahead of intubating so the surgery could begin. At the mention of this, Carter’s eyes got a little shiny, and his breathing picked up as though the reality of everything was just starting to hit him.

“It could be the aorta,” he told Benton worriedly, the implication of such a major artery being involved not lost on either of them.

If Peter weren’t so nervous right now himself, he’d be proud of Carter and his amazing medical mind for being able to think so clearly and analytically even at a time like this. The ability to stay calm and collected like this was a skill that had made him such a good candidate for his surgery residency, but also just seemed to be a natural fact of who he was as a person. He probably would have been like this regardless of whatever field of work he’d pursued.

“Or the vena cava,” Benton agreed. “Or the mesenteric vessels.”

“Oh god,” Carter swallowed unsteadily, biting his lip lightly to keep it from quivering.

“Carter, don’t worry. I am going to explore the abdomen. I am going to check out everything, okay?”

This reassurance appeared to land, and Carter’s gaze steadied, drifting over to Peter with ever-present mortal fear but also a sad sort of relief.

“I’m glad it’s you,” he said with a wistful smile.

It took everything Peter had not to break apart.

“I am going to get you through this, man,” he promised. “You hear me?”

At this same moment, the medication started to kick in, and Carter’s eyes started to close. Despite having seen this a thousand times before in every surgery he’d ever done and knowing perfectly well that this falling asleep was just the by-product of a drug, the sight of Carter drifting away startled Peter and made his heart skip a panicked beat.

“Carter?”

He gave no response, and the anesthesiologist happily declared it was time to intubate. There wasn’t time to lose here, but Peter wretchedly wished they had gotten to speak to each other just a little bit more before everything that was to come.

After scrubbing up and returning to the room, expertly reset for a midline incision, Peter had to take a calming breath to steady his nerves before he could approach the table. Once he finally did, he found it inexplicably impossible to look at Carter’s face. The plastic tube shoved down his throat was just too unsettling to stand.

“Ready?” Anspaugh asked him.

Peter paused for a second and then forced the scalpel in his hand down and through the tough skin and fascia of Carter’s abdomen.

It wasn’t long into the procedure that the first things started going wrong. There was more damage inside than anyone had imagined. For just a few wounds from one weapon, multiple vital organs had been hit and, almost as if intentionally, their vasculature had all been involved.

“There’s blood welling in the hilum,” Peter’s voice called out to Anspaugh across from him.

He was normally able to stay so even and collected during surgery, but even he could hear the way his words were cracking and falling apart as he said them. This wasn’t just any normal surgery–this was Carter, and things were not going well.

“Isolate the renal artery and get a clamp on it,” Anspaugh instructed, his extra years of experience shining through in his impossibly unflappable demeanor.

An alarm sounded, and a nurse announced that Carter’s stats had dropped and he’d become hypotensive. This had to be because his blood loss was officially beyond what the transfusions could replace. Benton’s own blood pressure skyrocketed.

“We’ve gotta get this kidney out of here before we lose him!”

Anspaugh tried to soothe him, but his words offered Peter nothing he needed.

“Peter, you need to calm down and listen to me,” he finally said sternly. “Before it’s too late, we need to turn around and see where all this blood is coming from.”

“Too many vessels are injured!” Peter argued; his raised hands, dripping with Carter’s pooling blood, were proof of that.

“Let’s be sure!”

After a little more digging and stitching, Anspaugh stepped in and finished his side of the renal repair. They both stepped back and watched as the unclamped vessels flowed freely and the kidney’s tissue began to pinken up in color.

“Alright, we did it. You were right, thanks,” Peter acknowledged, feeling embarrassed about his uncharacteristic panic but also unspeakable relief.

“Pressure is still down, 80/62,” a nurse read out.

“Are we caught up on volume?”

“Almost.”

The beeping of the monitors started speeding up.

“Then why is he still hypotensive!?”

Anspaugh leaned in to take a close look. “There’s some swelling in the periortic area. There is a hematoma forming.”

Benton’s eyes widened. “From the lumbar artery?”

“I hope so.”

“You hope so!?” Peter couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “If we have to tie it off, it could paralyze him.”

“That’s better than if it’s his aorta!”

They both reached in and, once their visual field opened up, it was clear that the hematoma was continuing to grow and would soon begin pressing on both the lumbar and aortic arteries. This was quickly becoming one of those worst-case scenarios Peter had first dreaded to imagine.

“Which do we try to clamp off first?”

“The aorta must take priority,” Anspaugh said firmly. “Young Dr. Carter could theoretically continue to live with paralysis, but he’d have almost no chance of making it out of the O.R. at all if the aorta bursts.”

Peter’s jaw clenched. This was an unthinkable decision, but Anspaugh was right. This was the lesser of two great evils, so they set to work clamping and draining the aorta as gently as they could. It really was as though there was no winning here at all, though, because every time they’d think they were making progress, some new tear would appear, and more and more blood loss and swelling would follow. Fixing this problem was quickly becoming a Sisyphean task worthy of Greek myth.

Just as he was finishing up on his most recent suture, more alarms began to blare, and Peter’s eyes were alerted to the terrifying sight of a widening gap ripping through the lumbar artery. The color drained from his face.

“You handle that,” Anspaugh instructed. “I’ll keep working on the aorta.”

Peter did everything he could and worked as swiftly as his hands would go, but with each passing second, it occurred to him that the chances of Carter losing all function in his legs were rising exponentially. To cope with it, he tried to remind himself that this would not be the end of his life but just the beginning of a new one. After all, Kerry Weaver had a disability and used a crutch and was just as good of a doctor as anyone else, so why couldn’t the same be said for Carter if, after today, he would use a wheelchair or some other device to move around?

Still, the thought that Peter would always be the surgeon who put him in that chair weighed heavily on his mind and made his heart beat fast.

“Have you stemmed the flow, Dr. Benton?” Anspaugh asked, snapping him back into his deteriorating reality.

“Um, yes,” he reported, fixing the final stitch but feeling absolutely no ease or resolution from it.

As if reading his mind, Anspaugh said, “We won’t know anything until he wakes up.”

Peter nodded and went to rejoin the aortic mission. He had to focus on Carter waking up at all if there was any hope of making it through this night.

At this moment, however, the incessantly deafening alarms around them began to speed up again until, all at once, they fell quiet, and the electronic drone of a flatline reading sounded.

Benton and Anspaugh’s eyes met with fear.

“What’s going on?!”

The older surgeon cringed sharply. “The blood loss has been too great.”

Peter felt a gasp pass through his lips. “No. No. Just hang more bags and add a unit of clotting factor! We can force this to stop! Get a crash cart.”

The head nurse and Anspaugh shared a dismal look after surveying their increasingly wet and red surgical field. Neither of them moved.

“Peter,” he tried gently. “The pressure from the hematoma and from trying to repair these vessels is only creating more tears as we go. As it stands, Dr. Carter’s abdominal aorta is already more three-O silk than tissue. Even with the reconstruction and transfusions, he continues to lose more blood than we can put in. The stress has been too much for his heart, and it has failed.”

“No!” Peter insisted. “We are not done here yet. You can’t just give up on him!”

“I am sorry, Dr. Benton, but it is time to face the fact that there is no longer a chance of a meaningful recovery for Dr. Carter. Between the organ and nerve damage, the blood loss, and the significant risk for infection with the bowel repair, there is nothing more that we can do. He’s already been under anesthesia for several hours and is not breathing on his own. There is nothing more we can do.” He paused, his brow furrowed as his eyes stared pensively down at their patient’s inanimate body. “He has died.”

Peter felt a wave of dizziness wash over him, and his head began to spin. This could not be happening.

His arms fell to his side helplessly as he stared at Carter’s open abdomen, the visceral mess of chewed and twisted tissue balled up inside him like ground meat. Slowly, he slid his feet along the floor and made his way to the other side of the curtain, where, finally, he laid eyes on Carter’s face. Despite all that chaos and noise, his eyes were shut peacefully. He looked at rest.

“Dr. Benton?” one of the masked nurses asked expectantly, but Anspaugh stepped in for him.

“No, I will call this one.” He said, before checking the clock on the wall, mournfully. “Time of death, 02:48.”

He tried to look at Peter, but Peter did not want to be seen.

His memory was not very clear of what happened over the next few minutes, but he was pretty sure he’d stood there longer than anyone else and had needed to be ushered out by one of the nurses so they could clear the room and prepare for the next operation of the day. Once outside, he removed his surgical gown and gloves and began to wash his hands, scrubbing roughly and rinsing thoroughly beneath scalding water until his skin screamed out in pain.

At some point after this, he’d made his way out to the hallway and collapsed against a wall, sliding down its vertical surface until he was sprawled out hypotonically on the ground.

“You did everything right,” Anspaugh tried to tell him, walking past, his face pinched together painfully. “This wasn’t your fault.”

“This shouldn’t have happened…” he managed in a slow whisper.

“No. It shouldn’t have. But it did.”

Benton pulled his knees in and clasped his hands over the top while shaking his head.

“Have they called his family already?”

“I-I don’t know,” Anspaugh admitted. “But I will call down to the ER and check. I’m sure that all has been handled.”

“They’ll want to talk to the doctors who took care of him,” Peter said absently. “And I am sure they’ll be angry and demand answers, want an investigation. Probably sue. It’s not every day that a county hospital kills the heir to the Carter family fortune, after all.”

Anspaugh’s frown deepened. It had been so easy to forget, considering how little John talked about it, but he was a pretty important person in this city, and his death was going to cause a whole lot of trouble.

“We didn’t kill him; that would be the person who stabbed him. We were just…unable to save him.”

“I wonder if they’ll see it that way, too,” Benton mused absently yet morosely. “I’m not sure I do.”

“It sounds like I should go talk to risk management about this,” Anspaugh decided, more of an excuse to leave Peter to his pouting than anything. “Do try not to beat yourself up about this, though. You went to miraculous lengths today that not every surgeon would have. You gave him a better chance than anyone else.”

And, in the end, it had meant absolutely nothing at all.

A while later, after Romano and Corday appeared, fresh from their work over the medical student who had been stabbed by the very same patient as Carter. Benton didn’t tend to pay a lot of attention to students’ names, and this girl hadn’t even been a student in his department, but he still felt sick that he couldn’t seem to think of her name. Someone had said it before. He was sure he’d worked with her in the past, but nothing came to him when he pictured her and tried to synthesize her name from the ether of his memory.

“We heard about Carter,” Elizabeth said softly, resting her hand gently on Benton’s sunken shoulder. “I am so sorry, Peter.”

“Were you able to save the girl?” He asked, changing the subject.

“Of course we were,” Romano boasted. “What kind of two-bit, hack surgeons do you take us for?”

Benton winced at these words as though he’d just been stabbed himself.

“So, she’ll recover?”

“It won’t be easy,” Elizabeth answered, glaring accusingly at Romano, whose smug grin was too much to bear. “But, yes, she has a good chance.”

“And we managed to do it without crippling her first,” Romano laughed. “I think that makes us two-for-two compared to you, huh, Petey?”

Peter would not be one hundred percent sure what happened next for some weeks to come, but he could swear that he barely recalled rising to stand and then blacking out, only to remember looking down to see Romano sprawled out on the floor with blood gushing from his broken nose. By the time the memories came back of his fist colliding with that jackasses face, it was the first good thing Benton had felt in a long time.

“Shut your damn mouth,” he said, standing over Romano imposingly. “You don’t know what the hell you are talking about.”

He stormed off from there and hid for a while in one of the on-call rooms, even when he knew that the others were searching for him. Whether it was because there were still more surgeries to do or more traumas to consult, or it was just that Romano was on the warpath, seeking him out to punish his act of rebellion, Peter didn’t care. All he wanted was a little peace and quiet to think about the fact that, in the matter of a few hours, the world had gone from having John Carter in it to moving on without him.

Eventually, someone did walk in and find him hiding, though. It was one of the medical students–another one whose name he didn’t know.

“A-Are you Dr. Benton?” They asked timidly.

He took a beat to think but eventually nodded.

“Oh, okay, um, I was told to come find you. The family of one of your patients is here and asking to speak with you. Weaver put them in the family room to wait.”

Peter did not even need to ask whose family it was. He knew it would be Carter’s, and he did not have the strength to face them.

Even so, he was led into the family room where he had expected to find a whole clade of rich Chicago WASPs waiting for him with their lawyers at the ready but was greeted instead by one small older lady in a fur coat who was so deeply sunken into the old couch until she was almost gone. Her face was grim and pale, and her eyes were red from crying. It broke Peter’s heart to see. She had to have been Cater’s much-talked-about grandmother.

“I-I’m Dr. Benton,” he said as he entered the room. “I’m sorry if you’ve had to wait. I was taking care of other patients.”

A lie.

The old woman looked up at him ghoulishly. “You were the one who tried to do surgery on my grandson?”

He nodded. “His wounds were already severe by the time anyone found him. The entire emergency staff tried to stabilize him, and then the chief of surgery and I both worked on him together for several hours. I promise you that we did everything in our power to save his life, but…”

He trailed off.

“But he died anyway?” She finished his sentence for him.

His eyes fell to the floor, too ashamed to even look at her. Carter had spoken so fondly and so often of his grandmother. It was so wrong in so many ways that she had to be hearing news like this now. In no fair world at all should a parent, much less a grandparent, have to outlive someone they’d raised.

“Yes, he did.”

“When I first got the call, I thought it had to have been a mistake,” she told him bleakly. “My first thought was that this call about a stabbing at the hospital had to be a call for John, asking him to rush in to work, that I had intercepted by accident. I nearly called for him to come to the phone before I realized the truth.”

Benton didn’t know what to say.

“None of us ever wanted him to be a doctor,” she continued without prompting. “I used to beg and plead with him to leave this place behind and come back to work for the family, where he belonged. And then, when he made it clear that medicine was his life’s work and passion, I begrudgingly accepted it but still urged him to at least go into private practice or go to work at a more pleasant grade of hospital. He wouldn’t hear of it, though. He loved this place… He loved this place, and this is the thanks he got for it.”

Benton’s teeth clenched together so tightly that his jaw began to hurt.

“This should never have happened,” he agreed quietly. “To anyone, much less Carter of all people.”

“Being a doctor was all he ever wanted,” his grandmother said sadly. “Ever since the leukemia took his brother, it was all he thought about. He used to sit in my kitchen, doing his homework and talking about how hard he would need to study to get into medical school, while the chef cooked him grilled cheese. That is… that was his favorite food, you know. That grandson of mine always liked a grilled cheese sandwich. And with that disgusting fake plastic cheese, mind you, never anything real. I tried to get him to have one with aged English cheddar once, but he wouldn’t touch it.”

All the money and privilege in the world, plus a private chef to make you whatever you wanted without ever dirtying your hands or dishes yourself, and Carter’s favorite food had been an artificial grilled cheese sandwich? Peter didn’t know whether he wanted to laugh or cry.

“He was an excellent doctor,” Peter told her. “I was his teacher for a time. I was hard on him and pushed him, sometimes too hard, to be his best. But it was only ever because I knew what he could become.”

“You were more than that, Dr. Benton,” the old woman shook her head. “John used to talk about you frequently. He respected your opinion and your skills so much. He wanted to become a doctor worthy of working alongside you.”

I’m glad it’s you. Carter’s last words flashed through Peter’s mind again and drew tears up with them. That poor, stupid kid had literally trusted Peter with his life, and the only place it had gotten him was six feet under.

“I let him down,” Peter said without thinking. “I did everything I could think of, but even that wasn’t enough. He trusted me and I let him down.”

Carter’s grandmother shook her head dismissively.

“Before I asked to speak with you, I asked someone to let me see my grandson,” she explained to him. “I was told they tried to tidy him up so as not to kill me from shock when I saw him, but it didn’t work. I’ll admit that I nearly keeled over then and there the second I laid eyes on him. The gashes and cuts all over him were shocking, but they also showed me exactly how hard you all worked to save him.”

“But it wasn’t enough!” Peter insisted.

“Sometimes, nothing is ever enough,” she mused. “But only someone who cared as much as you did would have tried as hard as all that. My John was lucky to have had a friend and teacher like you.”

“He was still too young,” Peter heard himself scoff.

“Yes,” she agreed. “I certainly would have liked to have thrown him at least one more birthday party.” She paused sadly. “Thirty is when the men in our family officially mature into their trust funds, and the celebrations tend to be quite the spectacle. John would have enjoyed the party, but probably couldn’t have cared less about the money. He’d always been like that. In fact, I am as sure as can be that he would have just given it all away the second it had been signed over into his name. His grandfather will be relieved not to have to live to see that at least. That was just the kind of person John was, though–selfless.”

Hearing this, it occurred to Peter that Carter’s birthday was in June, and it was currently only February. John Carter had died at the impossibly young age of 29, just under three months short of his next birthday. One of the best men Peter had ever known–a universal donor of blood, sweat, time, effort, and tears–and he had not even been allowed to make it to 30. Fate truly was a cruel and unfair mistress after all.

“Are the rest of your family coming?” Peter asked. “The hospital has mandated that an autopsy be performed to confirm exactly why this happened. I wouldn’t want them to start until everyone has had a chance to see him and say their goodbyes.”

Carter’s grandmother’s eyelids narrowed.

“No. My fool of a son and that horrible wife of his are off galavanting in the Caribbean. I am sure they are still asleep and probably have not even heard the news yet. And, naturally, my husband is too distraught by the news to come in person,” she said coldly, most likely just hiding whatever the truth of his absence was in that way that women of her class and generation tended to when things got uncomfortable.

“So, it’s just you?”

“It was always just John and me,” she said. “So, yes. Since he’s gone and won’t be coming back, I suppose it is just me now.”

“The girl lived,” he suddenly blurted out, earning him a concerned and confused look from Carter’s grandmother, who could not possibly have already been made aware of the full story of tonight’s tragic events. “The patient who attacked Carter also stabbed a medical student. She was actually his student. He was teaching her just like I taught him. She made it through her surgery, though she lived.”

Her expression softened. “She did?”

“Yes.”

Her thin lips spread into a small smile. “John would have been happy to know that.”

“Any mentor would.”

Carter’s grandmother looked up at him softly. “Try to remember, Dr. Benton. There will be many years ahead for you and I to mourn what and who we lost tonight. It would be folly to try and experience a lifetime’s sorrow in one short night. Do not borrow tomorrow’s grief today or you will not be able to face what comes next.”

Peter bowed his head. “I really did try to save him.”

She nodded. “I know that. And of all the people in his life, he could have had at his side when he died, I really am glad it was you.”