Outside, a rainstorm began, and the library's old windows made the fluorescent lights look like constellations. Marta paused at a figure labeled "central sensitization" and read a vignette about pain that had outlived its cause—pain that persisted after tissue healed, like a song you couldn't stop humming. The author placed the clinician in the scene as collaborator, not commander: asking questions, listening to metaphors, learning a patient's language of symptoms.
