He said, “I’m sorry.” Small voice. Younger than thirty-two all of a sudden.

I told him I didn’t print all this for me. I printed it because somebody had to put it on his desk where he couldn’t pat it away.

Then I said the thing I’d been practicing at every red light all week, the thing I came there to say.

“You didn’t almost hurt me because I’m old. You almost hurt me because you stopped listening.”

He stopped pretending. He pulled my chart up, the real one this time, and he started reading it like it mattered. He took me off the antibiotic. He called Dr. Patel’s office while I sat there. He printed something for himself and, I swear to God, he highlighted it. Yellow. Right in front of me.

So the plot ends clean, I guess. The dizziness went away in about a week once the drug cleared. My heart settled back into its boring normal rhythm. He didn’t kill me. I’m fine. People want the story to end there, with the doctor humbled and the old pharmacist riding off.

But I’m not riding off.

Because I keep thinking about the month I ignored it. The ten days I told myself it was just getting old. I caught everybody else’s mistakes for thirty-eight years, and I almost didn’t catch my own, because somewhere in there I’d started believing them. At your age. At your age. At your age.

I don’t know how many other women sat in that chair before me and went home and took the pill. I’ll never know. That’s the part that sits on me at night. I got lucky because I knew. They just trusted.

I still haven’t thrown out the highlighter.