Skin Privilege Read Free

She should be at home right now, reading a book or talking on the phone to her sister. She should be going over patient files or sorting through old medical journals she never seemed to have time to catch up on.
    She should be trusted.
    ‘So,’ the lawyer continued. The woman had given her name at the start of the deposition, but Sara couldn’t remember it. All she had been able to concentrate on at the time was the look on Beckey Powell’s face. Jimmy’s mother. The woman whose hand Sara had held so many times, the friend she had comforted, the person with whom she had spent countless hours on the phone, trying to put into simple English the medical jargon the oncologists in Atlanta were feeding the mother to explain why her twelve-year-old son was going to die.
    From the moment they’d entered the room, Beckey had glared at Sara as if she were a murderer. The boy’s father, a man Sara had gone to school with, had not even been able to look her in the eye.
    ‘Dr. Tolliver?’ the lawyer pressed.
    ‘Linton,’ Sara corrected, and the woman smiled, just as she did every time she scored a point against Sara. This happened so often that Sara was tempted to ask the lawyer if she suffered from some unusually petty form of Tourette’s.
    ‘On the morning of the seventeenth – this was the day after Easter – you got lab results from the cell blast you’d ordered performed on James Powell. Is that correct?’
    James. She made him sound so adult. To Sara, he would always be the six-year-old she had met all those years ago, the little boy who liked playing with his plastic dinosaurs and eating the occasional crayon. He’d been so proud when he told her that he was called Jimmy, just like his dad.
    ‘Dr. Tolliver?’
    Buddy Conford, one of Sara’s lawyers, finally spoke up. ‘Let’s cut the crap, honey.’
    ‘Honey?’ the lawyer echoed. She had one of those husky, low voices most men found irresistible. Sara could tell Buddy fell into this category, just as she could tell that the fact the man found his opponent desirable heightened his sense of competitiveness.
    Buddy smiled, his own point made. ‘You know her name.’
    ‘Please instruct your client to answer the question, Mr. Conford.’
    ‘Yes,’ Sara said, before they could exchange any more barbs. She had found that lawyers could be quite verbose at three-hundred-fifty dollars an hour. They would parse the meaning of the word ‘parse’ if the clock was ticking. And Sara had two lawyers: Melinda Stiles was counsel for Global Medical Indemnity, an insurance company to whom Sara had paid almost three and a half million dollars over the course of her medical career. Buddy Conford was Sara’s personal lawyer, whom she’d hired to protect her from the insurance company. The fine print in all of Global’s malpractice policies stipulated limited liability on the part of the company when a patient’s injury was a direct result of a doctor’s willful negligence. Buddy was here to make sure that did not happen.
    ‘Dr. Linton? The morning of the seventeenth?’
    ‘Yes,’ Sara answered. ‘According to my notes, that’s when I got the lab results.’
    Sharon, Sara remembered. The lawyer was Sharon Connor. Such an innocuous name for such a horrible person.
    ‘And what did the lab results reveal to you?’
    ‘That more than likely, Jimmy had acute myeloblastic leukemia.’
    ‘And the prognosis?’
    ‘That’s out of my realm. I’m not an oncologist.’
    ‘No. You referred the Powells to an oncologist, a friend of yours from college, a Dr. William Harris in Atlanta?’
    ‘Yes.’ Poor Bill. He was named in the lawsuit, too, had been forced to hire his own attorney, was battling with his own insurance company.
    ‘But you are a doctor?’
    Sara took a deep breath. She had been instructed by Buddy to only answer questions, not pointed comments. God knew she was paying him enough for his advice. She might as well start taking it.
    ‘And surely as a doctor