What remains behind after a child dies? A doctor? When an oncologist I revere died too young, he left behind a full bookshelf where I found his copy of De Vries’ 1961 novel flagged with post-it-notes and annotations. I picked it up to see what the doctor saw. The novel is an unsentimental education of a man who eventually finds himself as a father, only for his daughter to sicken and die with cancer. The doctor marked this passage of the father’s experience of the peds cancer ward: “And the doctors in their butcher’s coats, who severed the limbs and gouged the brains and knifed the vitals where the demon variously dwelt, what did they think of these best fruits of ten million hours of dedicated toil? They hounded the culprit from organ to organ and joint to joint till nothing remained over which to practice their art: the art of prolonging sickness. Yet medicine had its own old aphorism: ‘Life is a fatal disease.’” The gift of fiction: a doctor can befriend a patient, across time, by experiencing “the throb of compassion” together. This heartbreaker is the patient’s half of The Citadel.