My phone rang at 11:43 p.m., and the voice on the other end made my heart stop before I even understood the words.

“Richard, get to St. Mary’s now,” Dr. Alan Mercer said. “It’s your daughter.”

Alan and I had worked together for more than twenty years. I knew his voice in operating rooms, during trauma calls, through nights when life and death were separated by seconds. But I had never heard him sound like that.