It was a typically busy August day in the women's health clinic where I work as a nurse practitioner. Babies cried; toddlers ran up and down the hallway, trying to attract our attention. Patients, dressed in the same bright reds and blues as their children's ice pops, spilled out of the waiting room, laughing and talking with friends. But the patient whose story I carried home with me that day was the blond who appeared at three P.M. EUie, a drug addict, was twenty-six weeks pregnant; she walked into the clinic, her damp skirt clinging to her legs. "I broke my water," she said, and I led her into a room. The story unfolded as I examined her. She had smoked some cocaine; soon after, her contractions started. There was bleeding, she said, then a gush of water. Ellie lay on the table, hair matted, body tattooed with blue, misshapen roses and thorns reaching out like grasping fingers. The amniotic fluid streaming from her vagina was discolored and foul; she was infected, and it soon became evident that the baby had little chance of survival. As I peeled off my gloves and straightened my clean white coat, I thought my life and Ellie's had little in common. When the shift ended, I walked toward my car in the parking garage, past a man leaning against the building by the outpatient door and smoking the stub of a cigarette. He looked at me and said, "Hi." Automatically, I mumbled "Hi" in return. The man waited a second, then fell in behind me, his soft-soled shoes making a squishing sound on the pavement, like the squish of Ellie's sticky amniotic fluid on the clinic floor. My heart beat picked up a bit. I lengthened my steps. I calculated the distance to my car.