The surgery began at seven in the morning.
Roman knew this because he had been told the night before, and because he had been awake since four, and because by six-fifteen he was already seated in the corridor outside the surgical wing in a chair that had not been designed for comfort, with nothing in his hands and nowhere useful to direct the kind of attention that had absolutely nowhere useful to go. He had tried working on his phone. He had tried reading. He had tried the particular discipline of simply sitting still and letting the minutes pass in their own time without forcing them. None of it had held for longer than a few minutes before his eyes drifted back to the surgical wing door, which remained closed and gave nothing away about what was happening behind it.
