Thomas Reed approached him after the immediate rush settled. The attorney was holding his painful shoulder a little stiffly, and he looked embarrassed before he said a word. "Miles, I need to ask you something," he began. "But you can tell me no."
"Okay."
"My right shoulder has been bothering me for nearly two years. Doctors have told me different things, and it's been frustrating. I know you're not a doctor, but could you tell me what questions you'd ask about something like that?"
Miles looked interested despite his exhaustion. He asked Thomas when the pain began, whether it disturbed sleep, which directions of movement were difficult, and whether he had noticed weakness in ordinary tasks. Thomas answered, sometimes correcting himself when he realized his memory of the symptoms was not exact. Miles listened without interrupting, just as Rebecca had taught him.
"You can move it a little, but not all the way?" Miles asked.
Thomas demonstrated cautiously. Lifting his arm to the side hurt near shoulder height, and reaching behind his back had become particularly difficult. Miles remembered diagrams from an anatomy chapter he had found three months earlier, and he began thinking about inflammation around the shoulder, the joint capsule, and the structures that allowed the arm to move. But unlike the excited strangers around them, he did not rush to announce a final diagnosis.
"There are a few possibilities," he said. "A frozen shoulder can make it hard to move in several directions. There are problems with the bursa or tendons too. But a doctor needs to examine you and maybe review your scans."
Thomas stared at him. "Did you just mention adhesive capsulitis and bursitis?"
Miles nodded uncertainly. "They're words from my book. I could be wrong."
"The seventh specialist I visited called it adhesive capsulitis," Thomas said. "She also talked about irritation around the bursa. I spent almost eighteen thousand dollars getting to that appointment, and you thought of it after a few questions."
Richard opened another search page on his phone. "That's unbelievable," he muttered. "He's using the same terminology as the orthopedic guidelines."
"Terminology is only the beginning," said a woman standing behind them.
She introduced herself as Dr. Patricia Moore, an orthopedic surgeon affiliated with Temple University Hospital. She had been eating at another patio table and had heard enough of the conversation to become concerned about both Hamilton and the increasingly breathless claims surrounding Miles. When she approached, she did not act as though the boy were a magical prodigy who had made years of clinical training unnecessary. Instead she crouched so they could speak at eye level.
"What you just did was thoughtful," she told him. "You asked about the history before making a guess, and you said what you couldn't know. That's an excellent instinct."
Miles stared at her hospital identification card. He recognized the institution before he understood the compliment. "You work at Temple?"
"I do. Orthopedic surgery, and I teach there too. May I look at the pages you're carrying?"