She calls him.
Not his office line — his direct number, which she got from the hospital directory through the back channel she uses when she needs something an operator won't give. She calls him at seven-thirty on a Thursday evening, which is late enough to be personal and specific enough to be deliberate.
He picks up on the third ring. "Vale."
"It's Deborah Roseline." A pause. "I'm sorry for calling this late."
"You're not sorry."
"No," she admits. "I'm not. I have a question and I wanted to ask it before I thought about whether I should."
"What's the question?"
"Off the record?"
He is quiet for a moment. "You're a journalist. Nothing is off the record."
"I am. But I'm asking you to trust me with this."
Another silence. He is in his apartment — she can tell by the acoustic quality, the slight ambient quiet of an interior space. She imagines, without meaning to, what his apartment looks like. Sparse. Precise. The same way he is.
"Ask the question," he says.
"Do you think what the Surgeon of Sin is doing is wrong?"
The silence this time is different. It is not a thinking silence — it is too short for that — it is the silence of a person choosing how to answer a question they have already answered to themselves many times.
"That's not a simple question," he says.
"I know."
"You're asking a trauma surgeon who works with violent crime victims every week whether he thinks extrajudicial killing of violent criminals is wrong. You're asking that because you know the answer is complicated and you want to see what complicated looks like on me."
She does not respond immediately. She is surprised — not at the directness, but at the precision of it. He has named exactly what she was doing.
"Is that what you think I'm doing?" she says.
"Isn't it?"
"Maybe." A pause. "Or maybe I'm asking because I've been thinking about it myself and I want to hear how someone else works through it."
"You could ask any number of people that question."
"I could." She does not elaborate.
Another silence. Different from the others.
"Wrong is a container that holds a lot of different things," he says finally. "Whether something is wrong legally is different from whether it is wrong morally, and both of those are different from whether it is wrong practically. The answer changes depending on which container you're using."
"Which container do you use?"
"I use all three. In order." A pause. "Legally wrong. Clearly. Morally — that's where it gets complicated. Practically—" He stops.
"Practically?" she prompts.
"Practically, the question of whether removing violent people from a system that couldn't contain them prevents harm or accelerates it is one I don't have a clean answer to." He pauses again. "Neither do you. Or you wouldn't be calling at seven-thirty on a Thursday."
She sits with that for a moment.
"No," she says. "I wouldn't."
They are quiet together for a few seconds. The particular quiet of two people sitting at opposite ends of a phone call with the same thought in the room between them.
"Good night, Ms. Roseline," he says.
"Good night, Dr. Vale."
She hangs up. She looks at the board. She looks at his name at the center of the blue section.
She does not move it. She does not remove it.
She goes to bed and lies there for a long time thinking about the three containers.