Contents
Prologue
Overview
An unnamed doctor, who believed herself insulated from violence, is shot in the head in her upscale apartment. She feels no pain at impact, only in the aftermath. The scene overturns her assumptions about safety and foreshadows a harrowing recovery and consequences to come.
Summary
The narrator, an upper-middle-class female doctor living in a million-dollar apartment near Central Park, reflects on her prior certainty that being shot would hurt and that such violence would never touch her life. She contrasts her safety with the patients she saw during her intern year in a poorer neighborhood emergency room, where gun violence was common.
Despite her assumptions, the narrator faces a gun and, in disbelief, witnesses it fire. She describes the bullet’s path through her skull and brain before embedding in the apartment wall, a moment she remembers vividly.
Contrary to expectation, she feels no pain from the shot itself. Instead, she concludes that the true pain arrived afterward, signaling the beginning of a difficult aftermath and upending her previous sense of invulnerability.
Who Appears
- Unnamed narratorAffluent female doctor and survivor; recounts being shot in the head and the shock of it.
- Unknown assailantShoots the narrator in her apartment; identity and motives not revealed.