“I’ll be glad to.”

He led her down the porch steps and helped her into her car. When she was getting in he gave her fanny a pat. “Break a leg,” he said. “Call when you can.”

“Thanks, California. I’ll return the favor if I can.”

Cal watched her leave and then walked back to the porch where Tom sat, waiting. When Cal sat down with his coffee cup again, he looked at Tom to see wide eyes and lots of teeth.

“Whoa,” Tom said. “You know what you should do? You should lock that down right away,” he said, giving a nod toward the house, toward Maggie. “Seriously. Right away.”

Cal laughed. “And what makes you think Maggie’s ready to get locked down?”

“Are you kidding me? You need my advice? You a novice?”

“Pretty much. What’s your best advice?”

“Well, at least you’re an adult. I fell for my girl when I was a kid...”

Tom launched into the story of his marriage, family and divorce. It was both complicated and predictable. He fell in love at sixteen, knocked up his girlfriend at seventeen, married her, went to work before finishing high school, had four kids. Then the girl grew up and wanted more of a life, but she felt suffocated by a husband and four kids, so...

Cal was only half listening. He was thinking about how beautiful Maggie looked and how brave she was. Not for facing a lawsuit in court, although that took guts. Every time she clocked in to her role as a neurosurgeon she was facing the unknown and laying her reputation and indeed, her future, on the line. Making those life-and-death decisions in seconds took great skill and incredible confidence. She amazed him.

Amazing women, it seemed, were his lot in life. For this he pushed aside his trepidation and said a little prayer of thanks. Complaining of finding not only one but two of these remarkable females should not be condoned. Time to give thanks.

* * *

As Maggie drove, something Cal had said came slinking into her mind. Good things happen to good people, too.

Had she been properly mindful of the good things? Every time she held that cranial bone flap in her hand she was performing a small miracle. There were surgeries she’d come to think of as routine and yet she was conscious of the fact that whenever she was near the brain or spinal cord, it was a matter of life and death.

There were some procedures and surgeries that were more memorable than others. There’d been that inoperable brain tumor in a seven-year-old that Maggie dared to remove. No one would touch that little girl, it was just too complicated and dangerous. And no surgeon liked performing an operation that was 99 percent likely to fail. Yet the child was headed to certain death with a very minimal chance of prolonging her life—and suffering—through radiation and chemotherapy. But Maggie was willing to risk it for the child’s sake. She’d once scrubbed in with a neurosurgeon who had excised a similar lesion. She had a very impressive team backing her up.

They had several pre-surgical conferences to discuss it before taking it on. There was doubt all around her but it had worked. That little girl not only survived, she was now perfectly healthy. It was a total success. The surgeon who had scrubbed in to assist was an older man and he said, “You have the most beautiful hands I’ve ever encountered.”

There was a cyclist thrown over the hood of a fast-moving truck, paralyzed from the neck down. Maggie took him into surgery and performed a partial cervical laminectomy and repair and when he woke up he could wiggle his toes. A month later he walked out of the hospital.

She was not by any means a religious person; she could count on one hand the number of times she’d been inside a church in the past four years. She did have a deep spiritual core and every time she went into the operating room she had a mantra: God, still my hand and clear my head. And when she came out she said, Thank you, God.