At 5:58 the cafeteria was almost empty, which was why Lily Hartman had the whole window seat to herself.

She was six, and she had a strawberry milkshake the size of her head, and she was drinking it the way children drink milkshakes — with her whole face, both hands on the cup, her legs swinging under the table because they did not reach the floor. Her father sat across from her with an untouched coffee going cold and a phone he had put face-down on the table, deliberately, like a man making a point to himself.

The cafeteria smelled of floor wax and hot metal and the fryer behind the serving counter. Somewhere on the far side, an ice machine rumbled and dropped its load into a bin with a sound like gravel.

"Brains," Lily said, which was what she called the brain-shaped jelly she had been promised for dessert. "You said."

"I said after."

"You said it."

Daniel Hartman laughed, and it was the good kind of laugh, the kind he only did in this building when there was nobody in the room who might need something from him.

Then his daughter dropped her cup.

Not set it down. Dropped it — the straw skittered under the table, pink spreading across the beige tray in a slow arc, and Lily's hands went to her chest and her mouth made a shape that had no sound behind it at all. She slid sideways off the chair like a coat coming off a hook and she was on the floor before Daniel had gone round the table, and the sound he made brought every person in the room up out of their seats at once.

Somebody shouted for a doctor. A woman in a catering apron ran for the door. Daniel Hartman, who sat on the board of this hospital and whose signature could move seven figures from one line to another by Friday, got down on the tile floor with his daughter and put his mouth over hers and breathed — wrong, badly, the way people breathe into other people in car parks and kitchens and swimming pools — and kept breathing with the milkshake soaking through both knees of his trousers.

Six minutes to the trauma bay. Three nurses and a stretcher and a set of doors that had to be hit with a shoulder.

By the time they wheeled her through, the girl's heart had not been beating for something like seven minutes.

Dr. Ellis Whitman was already gloved when they came in. Twenty years of attending had made him faster at reading a room than at reading a chart, and he had read this one before he finished crossing the floor. There was a rhythm being done on the chest of that child by a resident who was doing it well, and there was a monitor over the head of the bed drawing a line that stayed where it was, and there was a father in the doorway with pink on his knees and a face that had stopped working.

Whitman had called two hundred of these. He knew the exact moment when a heart has decided. It isn't a slow fade; it's a door shutting somewhere in a room you can't see, and everything after that is people doing the motions of medicine with their hands while their eyes tell the truth.

They gave her everything they had. Twelve minutes of it. Epinephrine, twice. The paddles. The resident's shoulders starting to shake with the effort and the nurse beside him taking over without being asked.

At 6:42, Whitman stepped back from the bed and put his bare hand flat over the child's forehead for one second — a thing he had never once done in twenty years, and could not have explained — and he said the words.

"She's gone. I'm sorry."

A nurse covered her mouth. The monitor went on making its one long sound. The room went the way rooms go when everything in it has to stop at the same time and nobody has told it what to do next.