“Kidney stones are rough,” she had said with a sympathetic smile. “But we’re dealing with a few critical patients tonight. It might be a little while.”
So there I was, waiting.
My name is Nathan Walker, thirty-eight years old, accountant by profession, and at that moment the most miserable man in Ohio. Every few minutes another wave of pain rolled through my lower back and stomach, sharp enough to steal my breath and make my fingers grip the edge of the chair. I tried focusing on the clock above the reception desk because numbers felt safe and predictable. They ticked forward slowly: 3:12, 3:13, 3:14.
Two seats down from me sat a man who looked like he had walked straight out of a construction zone and into the hospital without stopping anywhere in between. His heavy steel-toe boots were coated in dried mud and white plaster dust, and his bright orange safety jacket was streaked with grime in a way that suggested a long day of hard labor. His hands were thick and rough, the kind of hands that build things rather than type on keyboards.
His name, I would later learn, was Robert “Rob” Delgado.
At first I didn’t pay him much attention. Waiting rooms tend to be places where strangers silently agree not to study one another too closely. But something about him stood out. He wasn’t scrolling through his phone like the other people in the room. He wasn’t watching the muted television hanging on the wall either. Instead he sat with his elbows on his knees, staring directly at the floor as if he were trying to solve a problem hidden somewhere in the pattern of the linoleum tiles.
His right leg bounced constantly, tapping against the floor in a rapid rhythm that betrayed a deep, restless anxiety.
